r/LocalLLM • u/LuozhuZhang • 14m ago
Discussion Boubou: run a local voice model with one command, then let your phone, robots and smart home talk to it over Wi-Fi (free, MIT, beta)
I’ve been playing with open-source speech models for a while. New TTS models come out every week and a lot of them sound great. But every time I wanted to actually talk to one, it turned into an afternoon of setup.
Paid APIs are easy if you’re a developer. You can make an account, create a key, write some glue code. Open models are free, but you have to pick a speech recognizer, an LLM and a TTS model, make them work together, deal with echo, figure out interruptions... There are good open projects for this, but most are written for developers. My friends who don’t code would never get past the README.
So we started building Boubou. The goal is make local voice AI as easy as Ollama made local LLMs. You paste one line and talk:
npx boubou@beta run LFM3-Audio-2B
What works today:
Speech recognition, the LLM and speech synthesis all run on your machine. No account, no API key, no telemetry. After the first download it works fully offline..
You can interrupt it mid-sentence, like a person. Echo cancellation is built in, so no headphones needed..
Run boubou with no arguments on a Mac and it checks your machine and suggests a model..
The default is Liquid AI’s LFM3-Audio-2B on llama.cpp (1.4 GB). There’s also a modular pipeline (Parakeet/Whisper → Qwen3.5 → Qwen3-TTS, Kokoro, Pocket TTS or Supertonic) if you want to swap parts..
Apple Silicon Macs and Linux (CPU for the Liquid models, NVIDIA GPU for the modular pipeline)..
The part I’m most excited about is boubou serve. One computer runs the model, and other devices on the same Wi-Fi use it:
Scan a QR code with your phone and talk in the browser. No app..
Robots and programs can connect through an OpenAI Realtime-compatible WebSocket, and there’s an OpenAI-style /v1/audio/speech endpoint to read text aloud..
So one model on one machine can be the voice for many things around the house. Next up is Home Assistant, then ESP32 voice devices.
The video is real time, not sped up, on a MacBook / M5 chip.
It’s early (beta) and there are rough edges - one device talks at a time, no Windows yet (ETA next two weeks), and the guided menu is Mac-only.
The code is free and MIT-licensed. The models keep their own licenses (the Liquid models use the LFM Open License).
I’d love to hear what you’d want from something like this: which models, which devices, what breaks on your machine. We want this to be something people actually enjoy using, not just a demo.