Hey everyone! So, you've probably used voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. They're super convenient, but have you ever stopped to think about where your voice data is going? Yep, it's being sent to the cloud, processed on some company's servers, & then sent back to you. For some, that's a deal-breaker. What if you could have all the power of a voice assistant, but keep it all on your own machine? COMPLETELY private & customizable.

Well, it turns out, you can! & it's not as hard as you might think. In this guide, I'm going to walk you through how to build your very own local, private voice assistant using some pretty cool open-source tools. We'll be using Ollama to run a powerful large language model (LLM) on our computer, & then we'll add some Python magic to give it ears & a voice.

By the end of this, you'll have a voice assistant that you can talk to, get intelligent answers from, & the best part? It's all yours. Your data, your rules. Let's dive in.

First things first, we need to give our assistant a brain. This is where Ollama comes in.

Ollama is a fantastic tool that makes it incredibly easy to run powerful LLMs locally on your own computer. Think of it as a local server for your AI models. No more relying on cloud APIs, no more monthly fees, & no more privacy concerns. With Ollama, you're in complete control.

Getting Ollama up & running is a breeze.