Brainstorming a system

Community Projects SmartBoomBoxes
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Brainstorming a design for music boxes in perhaps a living room, an office, a kitchen and 3 bedrooms:

All boxes have:

  • Superior craftsmanship and fidelity
  • Quality microphones
  • A personal voice assistant on an SoC

The box in the living room (“the hub”):

  • Has a powerful SoC (e.g. Nvidia Jetson Nano)
  • Is on WiFi and connected to the Internet
  • Runs a STT server locally (e.g. whisper)
  • Runs an AI-bot locally for “fallback” questions (best one to start with?)
  • Can get AI-bot answers from the Internet
  • Has music library in local file system
  • Can get music and news from the Internet

The other 5 boxes:

  • Have less powerful SoCs (e.g. RasPi 5)
  • Are on WiFi but can only connect to the hub (iptables)
  • Do STT from the hub (“remote”)
  • Do TTS locally (e.g. piper)
  • Get “fallback” answers from the Hub
  • Mounts the music file system from the hub
  • Can stream music/news w/hub as a proxy

Privacy/security advantages:

  • Only the hub faces the Internet
  • No speech leaves the building
  • AI-bots are done locally unless asked to use Internet
  • Music/news can be done locally and remotely

Has anyone got an AI-bot running locally? Any suggestions?

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Hey @mike99mac

Looks like a HiveMind scenario to me.

I did a video about running everything locally on Jetson Orin Nano a bit more than a month ago so its definitely possible but not super easy at first mostly because JetPack 6.2 sucks and I added a layer of complexity with Kubernetes. :stuck_out_tongue:

Since then I was able to run a newer version of Ollama which now allows me to run Gemma3, Qwen3, DeepSeek, etc… LLMs.

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Nice work! You’re way ahead of me. I am enjoying learning. Yes, I agree with you on JetPack. The humor skill could use a little work - maybe we can find a stand-up comedian willing to do FOSS. :laughing:

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It is not a skill but the local AI making a joke :smiley:

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