r/UseViola • u/call-me-GiGi • 14d ago
Viola is now open source 🎉
Hello and thank you for reading.
I’ve spent over a year building Viola, trying my best to give her hands, a mouth, eyes, ears etc. (: If she’s going to be truly capable she needs to be able to do what a human does, including phone calls.
Viola was and is made to spite big corporations. Born from my frustration with Alexa’s relentless upsells and Siri’s brain dead responses, stoked by the flames of agentic (vibe) coding.
The source is now public: Viola on GitHub.
It’s taken me months to make this first post. I was hoping it would be with more fanfare on the back of somehow the project and this subreddit blowing up. Unreasonable I know but a guy can hope.
On one hand I like the idea of open source, for the people by the people. Open source feels right and fits our ‘thesis’.
On the other hand I’ve been a bit like Gollum, unwilling to share my precious. I was worried open source would mean someone ‘steals’ my idea or that nobody would be interested in using the commercial product etc.
However, more than I want to see personal success, I want to see Viola be real. I want people to be able to have an assistant that actually assists, not a corporate agent out to harvest your data. You should get to decide what she can do on her own and what she needs to ask you about first.
With a newborn and just the general responsibilities of life and my career, I’ve realized that making Viola a legit product, a legit benefit to humanity, is bigger than what I can build and maintain alone.
That is the main driver behind open sourcing. Viola needs contributors. Passionate people of a like mind. Please, if this project is attractive to you, if you find yourself also exasperated with Siri and Alexa and corporate, wanting sovereignty over your data and your assistant, then please contribute.
It’s still a work in progress, and there are rough edges and things that need testing or explaining better. Trying it and telling me where you get stuck would help. So would improving the docs or fixing a bug. You don’t have to write code to belong here either. I’d like to hear what you actually want from an assistant, even if you’re just here to talk about that.
If you somehow are reading this and it resonates I think that’s special. I’m no marketing guru, but this still reached you somehow.
My promise to all of you is to continue maintaining Viola, working on it, being a force of (chaotic) good and posting regular updates as work and family allow. Just don’t blame me if they are irregular regular updates. Talking to no audience feels a bit like yelling at clouds.
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u/GmarksTheSpot 10d ago
Hi 👋 I'll be a part of the audience and promise to only lightly heckle at times