AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Build a conversational AI companion device for $10
We built an open-source project Starmoon and are using affordable hardware components to bring AI characters to real-word objects like toys and plushies (or even your talking fridge). With voice to voice models sounding more and more human every day, a cool use-case would be to take the conversation away from screens and personify real-world objects. For our project we use an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a mic and a mono-speaker to keep the cost at $10. We are fully open-sourcing our frontend, backend and firmware so you too can get started and create and customize your companion device.…
Starmoon is an open-source project that adds conversational AI to physical objects like toys, plushies, or household items using voice-based interaction. Built on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a microphone and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Build a conversational AI companion device for $10 launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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1. In the US, about 1/5 children are hospitalized each year that don’t have a caregiver. Caregiver such as play therapists and parents’ stress can also affect children's emotions. 2. Not everyone is good at making friends and not everyone has a BFF to talk to. Imagine you're having a hard time in life or at work, and you can't tell your parents or friends. So, we built an open-source project Starmoon and are using affordable hardware components to bring AI characters to real-word objects like toys and plushies to help people emotional growth. We believe this is a complement tool and it…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Character AI▲393Building the next generation of conversational AI
2023 · character.ai · its alternatives →
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Hey there, I’m Brian. I've been shipping conversational models over here at Tavus for the past two years. I want to tell you about our new audio-understanding model: Sparrow-2! It’s a new category of model and a unique new approach to conversational audio. Earlier this year we launched Sparrow-1, (at the time) our SoTA turn taking model. Since our Sparrow-1 launch, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to humans talking and trying to really understand how people know when to talk, when to listen, and when to wait. I’ve also been hunting down failure modes of the current SoTA models. And while…
2024 · tavus.io · its alternatives →
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Have a natural, spoken conversation with AI! Contribute to KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Luke from ElevenLabs here. We just released Scribe Realtime v2, our new real-time Speech to Text model. We rebuilt it from the ground up around a new architecture that uses predictive transcription – it anticipates the next likely word before it’s spoken. That makes it both fast (around 150 ms latency) and highly accurate. Scribe v2 Realtime outperforms every low latency transcription model across 30 commonly used EU and Asian languages – 93.5% accuracy, compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash (91.4%), GPT-4o MiniTranscribe (90.7%), and Deepgram Nova 3 (85%). It supports 90+ languages including…
2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →
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Talkie AI▲284The most immersive experience with all your dream characters
2024 · talkie-ai.com · its alternatives →
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Botify AI▲437Create digital humans for engaging conversations
2021 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Lightning V3▲311Add AI Voice & Chat Agents directly to your website.
Apr 2026 · smallest.ai · its alternatives →
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WhisperFusion builds upon the capabilities of open source tools WhisperLive and WhisperSpeech to provide a seamless conversations with an AI chatbot.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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High-quality voice clones with just 60 seconds of audio
2023 · wavel.ai · its alternatives →
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Pushing the boundaries of conversational AI
2025 · rapport.cloud · its alternatives →
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Voxos is an open-source desktop voice assistant that aims to put Clippy to shame while supporting new desktop workflows powered by LLMs. Tired of copy and pasting ChatGPT responses between your web browser and IDE? Does your copilot not quite do what you need it to do? I invite you to give Voxos a try and maybe even become a contributor!
2024 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →
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fullmoon▲321Chat with private and local large language models
2025 · fullmoon.app · its alternatives →
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Inworld TTSfree tier, from $25/mo▲318Hey HN, this is Igor, one of the engineers behind Inworld Runtime, which we're releasing today in public preview. We built it to solve the common problem we and our customers had: engineers spend more time on AI ops and plumbing than on actual feature development. This was often due to the challenge of using Python for I/O-bound, high-concurrency workloads and complexity maintaining pipelines with streams that use always-changing ML models. Our solution is a high-performance runtime written in C++ with the core idea of defining AI logic as graphs. For instance, a basic voice-to-voice…
2025 · inworld.ai · its alternatives →
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Welcome to Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. This is a project that allows anyone to easily build their own self-hosted J.A.R.V.I.S-like voice assistant. In my mind vocal computing is the future of human-computer interaction and by open sourcing this code I hope to expedite us on that path. I have had a blast working on this so far and I'm excited to continue to build with it. It uses whisper.cpp [1], Coqui TTS [2] and OpenAI [3] to do speech-to-text, text-to-text and text-to-speech inference all 100% locally (except for text-to-text). In the future I plan to swap out OpenAI for llama.cpp [4]. It is…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Alt link: https://mrchristmas.com/products/santas-magical-telephone Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z7QJxZWFQg The first time I talked with AI santa and it responded with a joke I was HOOKED. The fun/nonsense doesn't click until you try it yourself. What's even more exciting is you can build it yourself: libpeer: https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer pion: https://github.com/pion/webrtc Then go do all your fun logic in your Pion server. Connect to any Voice AI provider, or roll your own via Open Source.…
2025 · walmart.com · its alternatives →
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EmemeAI▲185Create & Export AI characters to apps and games
2025 · video2motion.org · its alternatives →
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Local voice chatbot for engaging conversations, powered by Ollama, Hugging Face Transformers, and Coqui TTS Toolkit - mezbaul-h/june
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Chat with AI▲129Chat with 15+ AI models, web-enabled, file analyzer
2024 · krater.ai · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →