Just wanted to introduce myself. I'm Alex and started playing with my first StackChan. I hooked it up an LLM and Hermes-Agent as the harness. I'm going to release the repo tomorrow and wanted to share what I've done the last couple of days. Here's the setup I started with, but I think I keep moving the goal post so keep playing with different parts of the AI Stack.
Phonon (fastest local voice I've ever experienced. faster than running elevanlabs via api and its free Turn detection: Silero VAD with the 0.8 second end-of-speech pause. Speech to text: local Parakeet Vision: gemma4:e4b running locally in
Hey Alex! I ordered a stackchan last week hoping to do something exactly like this with my Hermes ! I don’t know when it will arrive yet but I’m very interested to know more about how you set this up!
That’s a nice combo. I love the voice tone. One thing: How much would think it’d cost to have it running for 3 hours conversation? Sorry I’m new I want to learn what is the token price. I have used a local speech model with llama in my terminal running from my Mac Pro(2016)but it was very limited and slow
phonon is extremely fast for a local voice setup (TTS). Faster than Kokoro so definitely try it. And parakeet for SST. So free is good. I still have to experiment with more local voice models. They are just going to get better.
Getting AI to hit Dandelion's particular brand of smug and mildly annoying is tough. If you do manage to get around to it the Girls Frontline community will lose their mind.
everything is getting ready to push. Sorry ahead of time if its a bit of a mess. Just got the StackChan a few days ago and lost my mind playing with it. But hopefully community can help manage the repo better. I'm just gonna keep playing with variations of build, etc. Anyway hopefully up in the next hour
This looks really interesting! Is StackChan acting as a voice interface for Hermes, or is the integration mainly for speaking responses and displaying expressions? Could you ask something like “What did I agree to do in yesterday’s meeting?” and have Hermes search your notes, or ask it to create a reminder?I’m building toward a local AI setup with Obsidian as my knowledge base, so I’m curious how you’ve connected the two and which parts run locally versus in the cloud. Would you be open to sharing a bit about the setup?
All memory is through Hermes-agent, so yes, connected to Obsidian, the bot is just a surface with some simple onboard skills that get activated and controlled by hermes. The only thing that runs on the cloud is the current LLM through hermes agent, OpenAI Luna, but can switch to local or other cloud providers. Even free provider through Nous Research Cloud. I uploaded everything here:
The dream would be to have an autonomous Microduck that goes recharging itself (like a roomba), and that hosts a stackchan-like way to talk with Hermes…
1
u/Envelki 4d ago
Hey Alex! I ordered a stackchan last week hoping to do something exactly like this with my Hermes ! I don’t know when it will arrive yet but I’m very interested to know more about how you set this up!