AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Willow Inference Server: Optimized ASR/TTS/LLM for Willow/WebRTC/REST
Hey HN! Willow Inference Server (WIS) is a focused and highly optimized language inference server implementation. Our goal is to "automagically" enable performant, cost-effective self-hosting of released state of the art/best of breed models to enable speech and language tasks: Primarily targeting CUDA (works on CPU too) with support for low-end (cheap) devices such as the Tesla P4, GTX 1060, and up. Don't worry - it screams on an RTX 4090 too! (See benchmarks on Github). Memory optimized - all three default Whisper (base, medium, large-v2) models loaded simultaneously with TTS support…
Willow Inference Server is an optimized inference platform for running speech recognition, text-to-speech, and language models on self-hosted hardware. It supports GPU acceleration on CUDA devices ranging from budget… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Willow Inference Server: Optimized ASR/TTS/LLM for Willow/WebRTC/REST launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
As the Home Assistant project says, it's the year of voice! I love Home Assistant and I've always thought the ESP BOX[0] hardware is cool. I finally got around to starting a project to use the ESP BOX hardware with Home Assistant and other platforms. Why? - It's actually "Alexa/Echo competitive". Wake word detection, voice activity detection, echo cancellation, automatic gain control, and high quality audio for $50 means with Willow and the support of Home Assistant there are no compromises on looks, quality, accuracy, speed, and cost. - It's cheap. With a touch LCD display, dual…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Hey HN! We were part of YC S24, ended up pivoting around. Made dictation that worked really well, and decided to go all in on agentic. We've done two major things. 1. Scribe is a revamp of our product. Continually learns your style (can get into details if comments want). TLDR; we fingerprint based off your edits, and make dictation sound more and more like you. Post-trained Llama 3.1 8b. 2. Dictation is completely free. Unlimited unpersonalized dictation for everyone.
Jul 2026 · willowvoice.com · its alternatives →
- 4
I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
First TTS model to support all 22 Indic languages + English
2024 · its alternatives →
- 7
We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Fast multimodal-native inference at scale
Dec 2025 · gmicloud.ai · its alternatives →
- 9
Willow on IOS▲395Write 5x faster with voice dictation now Available on iOS
Nov 2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 10
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 →
- 11
General Compute▲315AI models that run on an inference cloud optimized for speed
May 2026 · generalcompute.com · its alternatives →
- 12
The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol. Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day. A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship…
Mar 2026 · georgelarson.me · its alternatives →
- 13
- 14
- 15
CPU-first LLM inference server on llama.cpp. Runs useful models on free-tier ARM boxes; rewriting the input made it ~6x faster and more accurate than tuning the engine. MIT, benchmarks and failures included. - swellweb/reame
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
- 17
Vogent Voicelab▲171Hi HN! Voicelab is an API for optimized inference of top open-source TTS models. CSM-1B and Orpheus are the currently supported models, but we’re adding Dia, Chatterbox, Kokoro, and more in the next couple of weeks. While new ultra-realistic open-source voice models come out every month, most people still use one of a couple of closed-source providers. The reason is that these research previews can lack production-readiness; their inference stacks are usually not amenable to running things scalably (i.e. only one concurrent stream per GPU), and the public weights can generate speech of…
2025 · vogent.ai · its alternatives →
- 18AT
A 3.16M-parameter INT4 transformer running entirely in the on-chip memory of a Xilinx Kria KV260. Zero DRAM in the token loop, 59,965 tok/s on the fabric, bit-exact. Chat with it live.
Aug 2026 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
- 19
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 →
- 20
AI inference based out of India
Jul 2026 · inference.alvoff.ai · its alternatives →
- 21
Deploying vision models is time consuming and tedious. Setting up dependencies. Fixing conflicts. Configuring TRT acceleration. Flashing (and re-flashing) NVIDIA Jetsons. A streamlined, developer-friendly solution for inference is needed. We, the Roboflow team, have been hard at work open sourcing Inference, an open source vision deployment solution. Our solution is designed with developers in mind, offering a HTTP-based interface. Run models on your hardware without having to write architecture-specific inference code. Here's a demo showing how to go from a model to GPU inference on a video…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
- 23
Hi HN folks ! I am the author of AVA, a self hosted AI Voice Agent that plugs into Asterisk/Freepbx so you own all the aspects of an AI Voice agent in your own infrastructure. It uses Asterisk native Audiosocket/RTP with python engine to run STT,LLM and TTS loop. The project support several full providers openai, gemini, grok, elevenlabs out of the box and also provides options to build custom pipelines by choosing different stt tts and llm. It also supports full local agent if you have a GPU with 25GB RAM which enables realtime conversation along with tool calling. I started this…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hey HN! Voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home have sold hundreds of millions of devices. Unfortunately, they come with less-than-ideal things like an always on microphone (doing who knows what), data collection, and limited integration options. Echo devices especially also end up being advertising billboards you pay for and install in your own home. No thanks, I've already heard of the Barbie movie... Willow is an open source hardware and supporting software voice assistant platform. For $50 Willow hardware (from Espressif) is competitive with commercial products in every regard…
2023 · heywillow.io · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware alternatives
- Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model alternatives
- Willow Frontier Pro alternatives
- Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3 alternatives
- Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA alternatives
- Gan.AI TTS Model & API Playground 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 →