Pi-C.A.R.D
AI
voice assistant
SHOW HN2024
How HN took it
8 positive, 27 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 2 critical, out of 37 comments about the project. Thread score +0.19.
Idea: 3 for, 0 againstPrivacy: 2 for, 0 againstPerformance: 0 for, 2 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Privacy-focused offline alternative to Alexa
From 3 comments
All I need is a voice assistant that: - RPi 4 can handle, - I can integrate with HomeAssistant, - is offline only, and doesn't send my data anywhere. This project seems to be…
pawelduda on HNI really like having a voice assistant that focuses on privacy first. I will definitely try it. always add a video to show how it works. Thank you
8mobile on HNI'm looking forward to trying this. Hopefully this gains traction, as (AFAIK) an open, reliable, flexible, privacy focused voice assistant is still sorely needed. About a year…
ethagnawl on HN
Name and Star Trek theme well received
From 2 comments
Pi-C.A.R.D is perfect. Read it 100% as Picard, and more recognizable that LCARS.
rkagerer on HNExtra kudos for the name - and extra extra for using the good old "Picard facepalm" meme. But seriously - the name got my attention, then I read the introduction and thought…
rob74 on HN
Objections
Latency is high, about 5 seconds to start a response and 45 seconds for vision
From 1 comment
Fully depends on the model, how much conversational context you provide, but if you keep things to a bare minimum, ~< 5 seconds from message received to starting the response…
nkaz123 on HN
Wake word misdetection, the maker notes mis-heard versions of the wake word
From 1 comment
The wake word detection is an interesting problem here. As you can see in the repo, I have a lot of mis-heard versions of the wake word in place, in this case being "Raspberry".…
nkaz123 on HN
Requests
Run on a generic Linux box or a laptop or mini PC
From 3 comments
Is it possible to run this on a generic linux box? Or if not, are you aware of a similar project that can? I've googled it before, but the space is crowded and the caveats are…
knodi123 on HN+1. That's the #1 feature I want in any "assistant". A question: does it run only on the Pi5 or other (also non Raspberry Pi) boards?
squarefoot on HNThanks. My ideal use case would probably involve a mini PC, of which I have a few spares and most of them are faster and can be upgraded to more RAM than the Pi5, which…
squarefoot on HN
Offload heavy processing to a home server
From 1 comment
I have a decent home server, is there a system like this where the heavy lifting can be run on my home server but the front end piped to a ras-pi with speaker/camera, etc. ? If…
BizarroLand on HN
Better text-to-speech than espeak
From 1 comment
When I did a similar thing (but with less LLM) I liked https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS but back then I needed to cut out the conversion step from tensor to a list of numbers to…
t-vi on HN
Questions
Does it run only on Raspberry Pi 5 or other boards
From 1 comment
+1. That's the #1 feature I want in any "assistant". A question: does it run only on the Pi5 or other (also non Raspberry Pi) boards?
squarefoot on HN
How does the wake word work
From 1 comment
how does wake word work? Does it keep listening and ignore if the last few seconds does not have the wake word/phrase?
aci_12 on HN
Does it support languages other than English
From 1 comment
I didn't see a mention of languages in the readme. Does this understand languages other than english?
ghnws on HN
Can the model learn and keep memory beyond one conversation
From 1 comment
How hard is it to make an offline model like this learn? The readme mentions a memory that lasts as long as each conversation which seems like such a hard limitation to live with.
zenkalia on HN
Alternatives named
Home Assistant voice control
From 1 comment
Have you checked out the Voice Assistant functionalities integrated into HA? https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/ NabuCasa employed the Rhasspy main dev to work on these…
jhbruhn on HN
Rhasspy
From 1 comment
Check out Rhasspy. You won't get anything practically useful running LLMs on the 4B but you also don't strictly need LLM-based models. In the Rhasspy community, a common pattern…
baobun on HN
Mycroft
From 1 comment
I'm looking forward to trying this. Hopefully this gains traction, as (AFAIK) an open, reliable, flexible, privacy focused voice assistant is still sorely needed. About a year…
ethagnawl on HN
Willow
From 1 comment
Funny, I just picked up a device for use with https://heywillow.io for similar reasons
cmcconomy on HN