AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I open-sourced my AI toy company that runs on ESP32 and OpenAI realtime
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…
This project provides open-source code to turn an ESP32-S3 microcontroller into an AI speech companion using OpenAI's Realtime API. It includes firmware, client code, and a web interface that enables users to have… 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.
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hi! video[0] The idea is you could carry around this hardware and ask it any questions about the conference. Who is speaking, what are they speaking about etc... it connects via WebRTC to a LLM and you get a bunch of info. This is a workshop/demo project I did for a conference. When I was talking to the organizers I mentioned that I enjoy doing hardware + WebRTC projects. They thought that was cool and so we ran with it. I have been doing these ESP32 + voice ai projects for a bit now. Started with an embedded sdk for livekit[1] that jul 2024 and been noodling with it since then. This…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! This is an SDK for ESP32s (microcontrollers) that runs against OpenAI's new WebRTC service [0] My hope is that people can easily add AI to lots of 'real' devices. Wearable devices, speakers around the house, toys etc... You don't have to write any code, just buy a device and set some env variables. If you have any feedback/questions I would love to hear! I hope this kicks off a generation of new interesting devices. If you aren't familiar with WebRTC it can do some magical things. Check out WebRTC for the Curious[1] and would love to talk about all the cool things that does also.…
2024 · github.com · 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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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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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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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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Hi HN, OpenAI recently released a model for automatic speech recognition called Whisper [0]. I decided to reimplement the inference of the model from scratch using C/C++. To achieve this I implemented a minimalistic tensor library in C and ported the high-level architecture of the model in C++. The entire code is less than 8000 lines of code and is contained in just 2 source files without any third-party dependencies. The Github project is here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp With this implementation I can very easily build and run the model - “make…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The open-source framework for real-time AI voice
2025 · videosdk.live · its alternatives →
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I've been obsessed for the past ~year with the possibilities of talking to LLMs. I built a bunch of one-off prototypes, shared code on X, started a Meetup group in SF, and co-hosted a big hackathon. It turns out that there are a few low-level problems that everybody building conversational/real-time AI needs to solve on the way to building/shipping something that works well: low-latency media transport, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, phrase endpointing, pipelining data between models/services, handling voice interruptions, swapping out different…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, we've been working with OpenAI for the past few months on the new Realtime API. The goal is to give everyone access to the same stack that underpins Advanced Voice in the ChatGPT app. Under the hood it works like this: - A user's speech is captured by a LiveKit client SDK in the ChatGPT app - Their speech is streamed using WebRTC to OpenAI’s voice agent - The agent relays the speech prompt over websocket to GPT-4o - GPT-4o runs inference and streams speech packets (over websocket) back to the agent - The agent relays generated speech using WebRTC back to the user’s device The…
2024 · github.com · 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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- 14OO
Hello everyone. This is Yujong from the Hyprnote team (https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote). We built OWhisper for 2 reasons: (Also outlined in https://docs.hyprnote.com/owhisper/what-is-this) (1). While working with on-device, realtime speech-to-text, we found there isn't tooling that exists to download / run the model in a practical way. (2). Also, we got frequent requests to provide a way to plug in custom STT endpoints to the Hyprnote desktop app, just like doing it with OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoints. The (2) part is still kind of WIP, but…
2025 · docs.hyprnote.com · its alternatives →
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A few years ago, right after high school, I decided to try to make a simultaneous translation app for Android as a side project, it took longer than expected (about 2 years) and I had to make a lot of compromises (I had to use Google's API and therefore make users use a developer key because at the time there were no free solutions for speech recognition and translation that had good quality). At the end of university, I decided to pick it up again and finally, using OpenAi's Whisper for speech recognition and Meta's NLLB for translation (with both running locally on the phone), I managed to…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Tighter instruction adherence in speech agents
Feb 2026 · developers.openai.com · its alternatives →
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Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653752
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18IU
Hi Hacker News, This is definitely out of my comfort zone. I just wanted to show you guys because I'm super proud of it. It's a 100% faithful recreation based off of the schematics, patents, and ROMs that were found online. So please watch the video and tell me what you think https://youtu.be/auOlZXI1VxA The reason why I think this is relevant is because I've been a programmer for 25 years and AI scares the shit out of me. I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
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Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80/20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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OpenWispr▲190100% local open source AI speech-to-text model
2025 · openwhispr.com · its alternatives →
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Hi, I built TalkBits because most language apps focus on vocabulary or exercises, but not actual conversation. The hard part of learning a language is speaking naturally under pressure. TalkBits lets you have real-time spoken conversations with an AI that acts like a native speaker. You can choose different scenarios (travel, daily life, work, etc.), speak naturally, and the AI responds with natural speech back. The goal is to make it feel like talking to a real person rather than doing lessons. Techwise, it uses realtime speech input, transcription, LLM responses, and tts streaming to keep…
Jan 2026 · apps.apple.com · 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 →
- 24PF
Phones can often feel cumbersome when quick action is needed. This is where a sleek, accessible, and intelligent solution comes in—an open-source, AI-powered pocket recorder. It syncs recordings locally, provides summaries, and runs on low-power ESP32-S3 hardware with Bluetooth and WebSocket support. The device attaches to a phone via MagSafe or works as a standalone unit, effortlessly capturing conversations, meetings, and spontaneous ideas. The first prototypes were developed in a San Francisco garage, and the project is now being made open-source to let others build and customize it. Your…
2024 · openvision.engineering · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Open-Source Voice AI Badge Powered by ESP32+WebRTC alternatives
- openai-realtime-embedded-SDK Build AI assistants on microcontrollers alternatives
- Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. – open-source, self hosted, J.A.R.V.I.S. alternatives
- Inworld TTS alternatives
- Conversational AI 2.0 From ElevenLabs alternatives
- WhisperFusion – Low-latency conversations with an AI chatbot alternatives
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 →