AI Voice Assistant: Build Your Own Jarvis with Open-Source Tools
An AI voice assistant you can build at home: Whisper for listening, Ollama for thinking, Piper for speaking, n8n for actions. Real setup.
📜 Table of Contents
Smart speakers answer with canned responses. An open-source AI voice assistant thinks with your model, talks with your voice, and acts on your workflows - and everything runs locally.
The Stack
Wake word detection triggers the pipeline: faster-whisper (24,790 stars) transcribes your speech, Ollama (177,874 stars) with a local model generates the response, Piper (11,275 stars) speaks it back at near-real-time speed. n8n (199,484 stars) connects actions - calendar, home automation, reminders. Open WebUI (148,123 stars) adds a web interface for configuration.
Build Order
Week 1: voice in and out (Whisper + Piper). Week 2: reasoning (Ollama with a 7-8B model). Week 3: actions (n8n workflows). Week 4: wake word and polish. Budget: a Raspberry Pi 5 handles the full loop, or use any spare PC with 16GB RAM.
FAQ
Q: How fast is the response?
A: 1-3 seconds on a Pi-class device with a small model; faster with a GPU and a distilled model.
Q: Can it control smart home devices?
A: Yes - n8n has Home Assistant and MQTT integrations; the LLM maps intent to a workflow.
Written by our editorial team; tools listed here are tested or verified against public sources. Links point to official sites or GitHub repos for reference only — no paid placements.