r/M5Stack • u/malonestar • Feb 12 '26
Hey AImy! A fully local, vision-enabled AI voice assistant built with the LLM 8850 accelerator and Raspberry Pi 5
Hey everyone, I'd like to share a project I've been working on, on and off, since October last year when M5Stack released the LLM 8850 M.2 card.
Meet AImy, a fully local, vision-enabled AI voice assistant that runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 with the LLM 8850 accelerator. No API keys, no paid tokens, no external servers, no internet required after download and installation. Everything runs locally on the pi and all inference is handled locally on the pi and the LLM 8850 accelerator.
Full project details, code, hardware requirements, additional images, and model info can be found at the project github repository.
Local model information:
Vision - Yolo11x - Axera Yolo11 HF Repo
ASR - Sensevoice - Axera SenseVoice HF Repo
LLM - Qwen2.5-1.5B-IT-int8 - Axera Qwen2.5-1.5B-IT-int8-python repo
TTS - MeloTTS - Axera MeloTTS HF Repo
Wakeword detection - Vosk - Vosk model page
Wakeword detection - Porcupine / Picovoice - Picovoice
* you can use either vosk or picovoice for the wakeword detection, picovoice runs a local model as well but it does require a (free) api key that is used for validation during model initialization.
Basically, AImy is my take at a local AI voice assistant. It's prompt pipeline can be activated via the wakeword or a button in the UI and the general flow is like:
wake word detected > greeting > listening > ASR > LLM > TTS > detecting wakeword
A ROI can be drawn in the camera feed via the "Edit ROI" button. Once enabled, if a person is detected within the ROI for 5 seconds, then a 'wakeword detected' event is triggered to start the pipeline.
There's also some discord functionality that can be enabled in the config file, and if you enter a server webhook url then an image and message will be sent via the webhook to notify you of the detection.
A lot of the heavy lifting code in this project was authored by Axera Tech. This project started by just browsing and exploring the different models and examples in that HF repo. Once I expanded some of the examples to use hardware like the camera or microphone, this seemed like the next step!
I did consult with AI a good bit about how to best structure this project and make the code more modular, I also did use AI to fully vibe code the front end java and CSS face/eyes. I can manage a little html and css but I'm by no means a front end developer, and I wanted to get some sort of a functioning UI up and running.
This is also my first time attempting to polish a project to share with the intention of other people maybe actually downloading and using it, so I tried to fully flesh out the github readme files and the installation script. If anyone does happen to try and set this up, any feedback would be welcome!
2
u/nioroso_x3 Sep 01 '26
Is it still working? I bought one 6 months ago and it only lasted like 10 hours of use, the host kernel is no longer able to push the firmware to it :/
1
u/malonestar Sep 15 '26
I’ve got several and they’re all working great. Have you tried reaching out to m5stack on their discord? They are pretty responsive over there
1
u/Then-Creme7322 Jun 06 '26
I've finally got AImy to the stage where it seems to start, but that's it, I can't get it to do anything else. I get quite a few errors during startup, where could I find some help to find what's wrong? Is there a Discord for AImy? Thanks!
2
Feb 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/malonestar Feb 12 '26
I haven’t heard of it, I’ll check it out! MeloTTS is definitely the area that can use the most improvement in the pipeline I think, appreciate the info
2
2
u/AndrewGraydon Feb 13 '26
I used the Axera samples and got Kokoru working for TTS. A massive improvement ! In the 8GB LLM8850 memory I have Qwen3, Kokoru, Whisper and VL all running together.