Show HN: Local voice assistant using Ollama, transformers and Coqui TTS toolkit

Coqui's XTTSv2 is good for this because it has a streaming mode. I have my own version of this where I got ~500ms end-to-end response latency, which is much faster than any other open source project I've seen. https://github.com/jdarpinian/chirpy

These are easy to make and fun to play with and it's awesome to have everything local. But it will take more to build something truly useable. A truly natural conversational AI needs to understand the nuances of conversation, most importantly when to speak and when to wait. It also needs to know subtleties of the user's voice that no speech recognizer can output, and it needs control over the output voice more precise than any TTS provides. Audio-to-audio models in the style of GPT-4o are clearly the way forward. (And someday soon, video-to-video models for video calling with a virtual avatar. And the step after that is robotics for physical avatars).

There aren't any open source audio-to-audio models yet but there are some promising approaches. https://ultravox.ai has the input half at least. https://tincans.ai/slm has a cool approach too.

I tried a similar project out last week, which uses Ollama, FastWhisperAPI, and MeloTTS: https://github.com/PromtEngineer/Verbi

Docker is a great option if you want lots of people to try out your project, but not many apps in this space come with a dockerfile

Ok, I need this but cloning Majel Barrett as the voice of the Enterprise computer.

we have made an open source orchestration which enables you to plug in your own TTS/ASR/LLM for end-to-end voice conversations at -> https://github.com/bolna-ai/bolna.

We are also working on a complete open source stack for ASR+TTS+LLM and will be releasing it shortly.

Honestly, there are so many Project on Github doing STT - LLM - TTS that I lost count. The only revolutionary thing that feels like magic is if the STT supports Voice Activity Detection and low latency LLM inference on Groq, so conversations feel natural.

Looks interesting! Is the latency low enough for it to feel natural? How's the Coqui speech quality?

I currently use Ollama + Openwebui for this. It also has a really serviceable voice mode. And it has many options like RAG integrations, custom models, memories to know you better, vision, a great web interface etc. But I'll have a look at this thing.

Today we released our full open source end to end ASR+LLM+TTS dockerized stack at ->

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40789200

How does the STT compare to Fastwhisper?

How many RAM GB the model requires?

My very first Multimodal AI star on Github. Hope we see more of these in the future.

How long till a stand alone OS that makes AI usage its first class citizen?