hey-clever

You can build an always-on wake-word voice assistant by using openwakeword for activation, recording commands with sounddevice, transcribing with faster_whisper, and replying via edge-tts. This skill handles the entire pipeline locally.

To run a local voice assistant with systemd auto-start, you need Python 3, a virtual environment, and dependencies like numpy, onnxruntime, and sounddevice. The setup script configures the systemd user service for background operation.

Wake-word detection works by using openwakeword to trigger recording, then transcribing audio with faster_whisper. The Whisper tiny model handles keyword detection, while Whisper small processes full command understanding for accurate responses.

Yes, you can use openwakeword for local wake-word detection and edge-tts for spoken replies. The skill integrates both libraries to capture spoken commands locally and output synthesized speech responses.

To list audio input devices for a Python voice assistant, run the command python3 hey-clever.py --list-devices. This verifies available microphones before starting the sounddevice audio capture pipeline.

The voice assistant processes wake-word detection and transcription locally using openwakeword and faster_whisper, but it communicates with a gateway backend and uses edge-tts, which may require network connectivity for responses.