Alternatives
Products that do what OSS voice based conversational API with <1sec latency and other nuances does
Hi Hackernews, we're Maitreya, Prateek and Marmik. Over the past few months we've been working on building a platform to build, scale and monitor voice based LLM applications. Demo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSrOmyR7oQs) 1⃣ Open Source orchestration: We're open-sourcing our orchestration to quickly setup and create LLM based voice driven conversational applications https://github.com/bolna-ai/bolna/ 2⃣ Hosted API Platform: Exposing our managed solution via APIs to build voice driven applications…
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we have been building an open source orchestration which enables you to plug in your own TTS/ASR/LLM for end-to-end voice conversations at -> https://github.com/bolna-ai/bolna. Few days back, was having a discussion here in HN about the possibilities of having a complete open source stack for ASR+LLM+TTS. Today, we are releasing a complete open sourced Dockerized stack by merging Bolna with Whisper ASR, Llama3 and Melo TTS.
2024 · github.com
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Hi Hacker News! This is Maitreya, Marmik and Prateek, co-founders of Bolna (https://github.com/bolna-ai/bolna). With Bolna, developers can create end-to-end conversational voice agents. They can connect to their own custom LLMs, their own Telephony, their own models etc. and create application features requiring voice AI. Here’s a small video: https://github.com/bolna-ai/bolna/assets/1313096/2237f64f-1c.... Our product originates from building an AI interviewer bot which can be used for practising coding interviews like Leetcode. By…
2024 · github.com
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Hey everyone on HN! We recently spent the past couple of weeks building out an end-to-end platform which can plug-in multiple models (both open/closed-source) to create voice driven conversational applications. We've tried to make the process simple & concise through documentation. Feel free to try it out and provide feedback. We will be launching a dashboard in the coming week for monitoring and analytics alongwith more open source models. Let us know what you all think. (if you want to contribute, we have tons of features planned - do let us know)
2023 · github.com
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Hey HN, it’s Russ - cofounder of LiveKit. An open source stack for building realtime AI applications. We’re sharing our first homegrown AI model for turn detection. Here’s a live demo: https://cerebras.vercel.app/ Voice AI has come a long way in the last year. We now have end-to-end systems that can generate a response to user input in 300-500ms — human level speeds! As latency reduces, a common problem that surfaces is the LLM responds too quickly. Any time there’s a short pause in a user’s speech, it ends up interrupting them. This is largely due to how voice AI applications…
2024
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I built Open WhisperScribe after struggling with the complexity, paywalls, or limitations of most speech-to-text tools for macOS and elsewhere. My main requirements were: Simple, <5-min setup Runs fully offline, locally (no data leaves your machine) Works seamlessly in any app — just press a hotkey, speak, and your words appear where your cursor is (code editors, terminal, you name it) Fast and distraction-free It uses OpenAI’s Whisper model under the hood, but wraps it in a lightweight CLI tool that sits quietly in the background. The project is open source (Apache 2.0). Setup is a single…
2025 · github.com
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I wanted Whisper-level dictation on my Intel 2020 iMac without: * paying a monthly fee for the privilege of using my own API key, * hauling an 800 MB local model, or * copy-paste gymnastics from a floating window. So I built VTS (Voice Typing Studio). What it is: * 5 MB notarised menu-bar app. Press a toggle hot-key → talk → text lands wherever the cursor is. * Bring-your-own OpenAI / Groq key. Nothing touches my servers. * Universal binary – runs on Intel and Apple silicon. * MIT-licensed; core stays free/open. If future features justify it, a pro tier may appear. Repo, DMG, and…
2025 · github.com
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Hey HN, I'm Josiah. We love voice dictation, but wanted an open source version for transparency, privacy, and something that everyone could contribute to. So we built Voquill, an open source alternative to WisprFlow, Monologue, and Willow. It lets you dictate into any desktop app. Press a hotkey, talk, text gets inserted. You can run Whisper locally, use our server, or wire up any provider you want (OpenAI, Claude, Groq, OpenRouter, whatever). You have full control over where your data goes. Runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Open source, AGPLv3, built with Tauri and Rust. We're working on a…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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This weekend I finally shipped Gryt, a project I’ve been building since 2022 — an open-source, self-hostable Discord-style app focused on reliable voice chat + text. I’m the creator. I started it after getting fed up with Discord disconnects/paywalls and wanted something self-hosted and auditable. I started on this in 2022 and had an early proof-of-concept working back then (auth + friends list), but I quickly realized WebRTC voice isn’t something you can duct-tape together. I spent a big chunk of the next couple years learning the stack (ICE/DTLS-SRTP, NAT traversal, SFU design),…
Feb 2026 · gryt.chat
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Hey HN! I've been working on a side project to create an audio transcription API based on the OpenAI whisper model. Sign up link: https://whisperapi.com I tried to make the API really easy to use and get setup with. Also, because the Whisper model is so good, turns out I can offer the service for about 75% cheaper than what seems like the industry average. I'm always looking to make improvements, so would appreciate any feedback anyone has!
2022 · whisperapi.com
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Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com
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Hey everyone, here is an open source project I've been working on to add voice input/output to terminal based coding agents. One thing about the new terminal coding agents I really like is being able to multi-task but right now it's a bit like a Tesla on autopilot needing your hands still on the wheel. You need to be checking often if your input is required or if it's going off the rails. To be able to go fully hands free I wanted to add TTS and ASR. Then I added slack and WhatsApp hooks to TalkiTo as well. It's fully open source with a BYOK philosophy and it's configured to work with…
Nov 2025 · github.com
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Hello everyone, I've built a simple macOS app for chatting with models downloaded by Ollama - https://github.com/sheshbabu/Chital It's written in Swift, consumes less memory and loads fast. It has these features: * Support for multiple chat threads * Switch between different models * Markdown support * Automatic chat thread title summarization It's my first time working with Swift and Xcode, and it has been an interesting journey. The performance of the application is a big plus when building native apps, but I wonder if I'll be able to add features like document…
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN, I'm a longtime web dev, but this is my first macOS app. Feedback is very welcome <3 I built TongueType because every dictation app I tried failed at least one of three things: it sent my audio to someone's cloud, it charged me monthly fee, or it felt clunky or enterprisy. The cloud thing kills it for anything sensitive. The subscription thing is insulting for what amounts to "Whisper + a hotkey." TongueType runs Whisper locally on Apple Silicon via CoreML. It's built to feel like a second keyboard: tap the hotkey, talk, let go, words appear. It sits in the menu bar (no dock icon, no…
May 2026 · tonguetype.app
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I’m Hayden, a 13-year-old developer based in Australia, and I’ve built a CoT logical thinking and reasoning AI model similar to OpenAI o1. It's powered by open source small models like Llama 3.1 and 3.2 and I would love for you to try it and share your feedback with me. You can try it here: https://ai.pixelverse.tech/app/cortexchat I built it just for fun and launched it a day after the o1 release. It's not perfect yet but its still amazing to see how a detailed prompt can have such a difference on the quality of the LLM response! Please let me know any feedback or…
2024 · ai.pixelverse.tech
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Just finished the first draft of my weekend project. Sadly my industry is far away from all the exciting machine learning developments happening right now, so I wrote this project as my first exploration into the world of LLMs. It's not perfect, but I'm excited to see where the project goes from here! https://github.com/clarkmcc/chitchat My main motivations were: - Easy-of-use: Many models are supported out-of-the-box so users don't have to figure out how to download, where to save, etc. - Intuitive: A clean interface - Cross platform: The project is written in Rust and…
2023 · clarkmccauley.com
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hey hn, I built an open-source Perplexity clone that can run local LLMs and cloud LLMs. It's fully self-hostable through Docker and uses ollama to support local LLMs. The demo video in the repository shows me running it locally with llama3 on my M1 Macbook Pro. I'm open to any suggestions or feedback, thanks!
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN, we’re Dylan and Matthew, building sublingual (https://github.com/sublingual-ai/sublingual), an open-source LLM observability tool you can use with zero code changes. As developers focused on iterating and building features as fast as possible, we felt observability would’ve been a helpful tool to have, but we found existing solutions had too much overhead to set up. So we gave ourselves the challenge of building an observability tool that you can integrate without changing a single line of code in your project. How it works Run your python application as usual with…
2025 · github.com
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Hey folks. We built SAA (Selective Auditory Attention) after trying to find ways to make a good experience with multiple robots/multiple agents. What typically ended up happening is they'd never stop talking. This is an SDK you can put before your STT. It lets you know when your device is being spoken to or not without a wakeword. You can use it for: -Single AI, Multi human -Multi AI, Single human -Multi AI, Multi human (we recommend also adding a wakeword on top for a better system) There are two models. One that is video + audio and one that is just audio. The way it overall works is…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Hello all, I made a small transcription app for your Mac based on OpenAI’s Whisper. Would love some feedback. My plan is to make it easy to load weights from any fine-tuned whisper model to enable specialized dictation for any subfield. It’s still early in development. Thanks!
2023 · twitter.com
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