I built a free CharacterAI that runs locally
CharacterAI has over 20M active users and lets people talk to AI voice clones. I built a local alternative that clones any voice with <10s of audio and can talk fluently in over 10 languages, and runs locally on your Macbook or Mac mini. The voice pipeline currently supports MLX on any M1 through M5 chip. I used Whisper-Turbo for STT, Qwen3.5-9B-4bit for the LLM and Qwen3-TTS-0.6B-4bit for TTS. The repo also has a Websocket Transport to add these voices to devices powered by the ESP32 via secure websockets.
I built a free CharacterAI that runs locally launched on March 25, 2026 with 8 votes, #1,340 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Make Local AI Toys, Robots, Devices that work with a MacBook and an Arduino ESP32 - OpenToys/resources at main · akdeb/OpenToys
Make your own conversational Local AI Voice Clones, Toys, Desk Companions, Robots and more with an ESP32. Elato Local enables multilingual realtime speech with voice cloning and runs fully on-device on Apple Silicon chips without sending your data to the cloud. Create experiences with personalities that can play games, tell stories, engage in educational conversations. Here are some of the default characters with more prompt details in personalities.json . AI systems (local or cloud) are not perfect. This project is built with data privacy and safety in mind, but there are still important limitations: When using with children, use with parental awareness and treat this as a tool for…from github.com
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
AI Voice Cloning by Wavel2023 · wavel.ai · ▲360High-quality voice clones with just 60 seconds of audio
CaiApr 2026 · getcai.app · ▲179Hi HN, Cai runs actions on your selection via ⌥C, pick an action (AI, shell, GitHub issue, Linear ticket), done. Bundled local model (MLX Community), create custom actions with prompts, scripts and more. Free, MIT. Built after my Raycast extension sat in review queue for 3+ months. Wanted no typing, no app switching, no cloud. Repo: https://github.com/cai-layer/cai Demo: https://youtu.be/LH2MYNQ_wsk
More ai this month
the category →
Paintings by AI models: programs run through a simulation of oil paint.
AI · 22d ago · stillwet.art
FastRouter.ai▲364Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality
AI · 23d ago · fastrouter.ai
Source: Show HN post ↗
Launched alongside, March 2026
the whole month →
Switch from ChatGPT to Claude with import memory feature
AI · Mar 2026 · claude.com
Littlebird▲709Littlebird remembers everything across your meetings, messages, docs, and apps, then takes action so you can recall any detail and never lose context.
AI · Mar 2026 · littlebird.ai
