SOsoulofmischief·Jan 24, 2026
I have a great local assistant that works end-to-end with voice. It's built on local, web-first technologies, it fits small LLMs in memory and manages inference and TTS/STT without stuttering. I've been shaping it up over a couple years and constantly switching out new models.
If you want something simple that runs in browser, look at vosk-browser[0] and vits-web[1].
I'd also recommend checking out KittenTTS[2], I use it and it's great for the size/performance. However, you'd need to implement a custom JavaScript harness for the model since it's a python project. If you need help with that, shoot me an email and I can share some code.
There are other great approaches too if you don't mind python, personally I chose the web as a platform in order to make my agent fully portable and remote once I release it.
And of course, NVIDIA's new mode
Read the rest
l just came out last week[3] but I haven't gotten to test it out just yet, and also there was the recent Sparrow-1[4] announcement which shows people are finally putting money into the problems plaguing voice agents that are rigged up from several models and glue infrastructure, vs a single end-to-end model or at least a conversational turn-taking model to keep things on rails.
[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/vosk-browser
[1] https://github.com/diffusionstudio/vits-web
[2] https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS
[3] https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/personaplex/
[4] https://www.tavus.io/post/sparrow-1-human-level-conversation...