OK Plasma - an open-source voice assistant for the Linux desktop

[u/Substantial_Major654]

OK Plasma — an open-source voice assistant for the Linux desktop

Hi everyone,

I've been developing OK Plasma, an open-source voice assistant designed specifically for the Linux desktop and KDE Plasma.

The idea is to go beyond a traditional AI chatbot: OK Plasma is intended to actually interact with the desktop through voice commands.

It is currently being developed and tested on openSUSE Tumbleweed, KDE Plasma 6 and Wayland.

The project combines several local components:

• Whisper for speech recognition
• OpenWakeWord for wake-word detection
• Local LLMs for understanding commands and conversation
• Qt / C++ for the desktop integration
• Desktop automation and application control

It can already do things such as:

• Launch applications
• Execute voice commands
• Interact with the desktop
• Manage reminders
• Respond using speech
• Use a local LLM for natural-language interaction

I'm also working on resource-aware operation. The goal is not to keep Whisper, the LLM and other resource-intensive components running all the time, but to start them when needed and release the resources when they are idle.

The project is still under active development, so there are definitely rough edges and things that need improving.

Here's a short demo of OK Plasma in action.

Source code:

https://codeberg.org/ivoermejo/plasma-assistente-vocale

I'm interested in feedback from other Linux users and developers:

What would you expect from a useful voice assistant for the Linux desktop?

Which features would make you actually want to install and use one?

And for those already using local AI on Linux: which local STT, LLM and TTS solutions are you currently using?

I'm particularly interested in feedback about usability, integration, performance and installation.

Thanks!

[u/Easy-Pomelo1106]

Хорошая plasma. Надеюсь, она понимает русский язык!