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bogdan » a small, talkative box on my desk

08:15 pm on Jan 9, 2026 | read the article | tags: hobby

i’ve been playing for a while with the idea of having a real personal assistant at home. not alexa, not google, not something that phones home more than it listens to me. something i can break, fix, extend, and eventually turn into a platform for games with friends, silly experiments, and maybe a bit of madness.

this is how LLMRPiAssistant happened.

why another voice assistant?

mostly because i could. but also because the current generation of LLMs finally made this kind of project pleasant instead of painful. speech recognition that actually works, text-to-speech that doesn’t sound like a depressed modem, and conversational models that don’t need hand-crafted intent trees for every possible sentence.

i had a Raspberry Pi 4 lying around. i also had a reSpeaker 4-Mic HAT from SeeedStudio, which i always liked because:

• it has a proper microphone array,
• it does beamforming and noise handling reasonably well,
• and it comes with that ridiculously satisfying LED ring.

the rest was just software glue and some driver patching.

by the way, if you’re missing a Raspberry Pi or a reSpeaker, check the links.

what it does today

at the moment, LLMRPiAssistant is a fully working, always-on, wake-word-based voice assistant that runs locally on a Raspberry Pi and talks to OpenAI APIs for the heavy lifting.

the flow is simple and robust:

1. it listens continuously for a wake word (using OpenWakeWord)
2. once triggered, it records your voice
3. it sends the audio to Whisper for transcription
4. the text goes to a chat model (default: gpt-4o-mini)
5. the response is turned into speech via TTS
6. the Pi speaks back, with LED feedback the whole time

no cloud microphones, no mysterious binaries. just python, ALSA, and some carefully managed buffers.

things i cared about while building it

this project is very much shaped by past frustrations, so a few design decisions were non-negotiable:

• local-first audio wake word detection and recording happen entirely on the Pi. the cloud only sees audio after i explicitly talk to it.
• predictable state machine listening, recording, processing. no weird overlaps, no “why is it still listening?” moments.
• hardware is optional no LEDs? no problem. want to test it over SSH without speakers? it still works.
• configuration over magic everything is configurable: thresholds, models, voices, silence detection, devices. if something behaves oddly, you can tune it.
• logs, always logs every interaction is logged in JSON. if it fails, i want to know why, not guess.

the code

the repository is here: 👉 https://github.com/bdobrica/LLMRPiAssistant

the structure is boring in a good way: audio handling, OpenAI client, LED control, config, logging. nothing clever, nothing hidden. if you’ve ever debugged real-time audio, you’ll recognize the paranoia around queues and buffer overflows.

there’s also a Makefile that does the full setup on a clean Raspberry Pi, including drivers for the reSpeaker card. reboot, and you’re good to go.

what’s missing (and why that’s the fun part)

the assistant works. that box is checked. ✅ but i didn’t build it just to ask for the weather.

the real goal is voice-controlled games. sitting in a room with friends, no screens, just talking, arguing, laughing, and letting the assistant keep score, manage turns, and generate content.

that’s why the TODO list is… long. some highlights:

• conversation history that doesn’t grow until it explodes
• multi-player support with turn management
• local command parsing for low-latency actions (“roll dice”, “next turn”)
• persistent game state
• trivia, story games, word games, party games
• eventually, local models for fast responses

in other words: turning a voice assistant into a game master.

why open source

because this kind of project only gets interesting once other people start breaking it in ways i didn’t anticipate. different microphones, different accents, noisy rooms, weird use cases.

also, i’m long past the phase where i enjoy building things in isolation. if someone forks this and turns it into something completely different, even better.

what’s next

short term: fix the rough edges, especially around audio devices and conversation history.

medium term: multi-player games. actual playable stuff, not demos.

long term: hybrid local/remote intelligence, so latency stops being annoying and the assistant feels present instead of “waiting for the cloud”.

for now, i’m just happy that a small box on my desk lights up, listens, and talks back – and that i understand every single line of code that makes it happen.

more to come.