Notee
An embedded voice companion that connects a small physical device to local speech recognition, a language model and spoken replies.
Character artwork from the device prototypeThe challenge
Turn a tiny microphone, display and speaker into a usable conversational interface while keeping the main voice and model processing on a computer on the local network.
The approach
Use push-to-talk controls and an on-device conversation index.
Transport audio between the device and a local Python bridge over Wi-Fi, with USB support.
Connect Faster Whisper transcription to LM Studio and local speech synthesis.
Keep each conversation's model context separate and provide replay of the last spoken answer.
What the work demonstrates
- Implemented device firmware, an audio bridge and local conversation storage.
- The default speech pipeline uses local services without requiring cloud inference.
- Protocol, audio, controller and conversation-storage behaviour have dedicated tests.
