This is the kind of project I really want to make, especially now that LLMs are very capable, even the small ones. Just need a good computer to run the model off of. I wonder what happened to Mycroft? I looked forward to seeing more of it.
You don't need that much for simpler models. Some can even run on a PI.
Qwen3 and Gemma models are fairly capable, they are slow-ish (a few tokens per second) but will run.
You can start building with cheap hardware and simple models, and use something more capable once you're more confident on the use case.
kukanani•13m ago
Local inference is definitely a good way to go here. Latency when talking to an embodied robot is extremely noticeable though, and pauses during voice chats are way worse than during text chats.
It’s something I’m exploring - stay tuned :)
BlueRock-Jake•1h ago
Had not even thought about having kids in the house with an AI robot. Obviously there are the more apparent issues (asking about things they don't need to know) but saw a recent article about how ChatGPT and some other models have an implicit confirmation bias when interacting with users. I don't need my kid to reinforce bad ideas from their cute, all knowing, robot friend.
giancarlostoro•1h ago
Mycroft was an open source alternative to Alexa.
https://github.com/mycroftai
juancn•55m ago
Qwen3 and Gemma models are fairly capable, they are slow-ish (a few tokens per second) but will run.
You can start building with cheap hardware and simple models, and use something more capable once you're more confident on the use case.
kukanani•13m ago
It’s something I’m exploring - stay tuned :)