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Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

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211–220 of 238 posts

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#211

Every time I see these things, they look cool as hell, I get excited, then I try to get them working on my gaming PC (that has the GPU), I spend 1-2h fighting with python and give up. Today's issue is that my python version is 3.12 instead of =3.9. Installing python 3.11 from the official website does nothing, I give up. It's a shame that the amazing work done by people like the OP gets underused because of this mess…

Python packages and Windows don't mix well

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#212
post #201
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly it appears that people in the LLM space This seems to be somewhat of a Python side-effect, same goes for almost any Python projects thrown together by people who hasn't spent 10% of their life fighting dependency management in Python. But agree with uv being the best way. I'm not a "real" Python programmer, similar boat to parent that I just end up running a bunch of Python projects for various ML things, and…

There's been a movement away from requirements.txt towards pyproject.toml. And commands like "uv add" and "uv install" take most of the pain of initializing and maintaining those dependencies.

Thanks, as mentioned, I'm not really a Python programmer so don't follow along the trends...

I tried to figure out why anyone would use pyproject.toml over requirements.txt, granted they're just installing typical dependencies and didn't come up with any good answer. Personally I haven't had any issues with requirements.txt, so not sure what pyproject.toml would solve. I guess I'll change when/if I hit some bump in the road.

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#213
post #167

Every time I see these things, they look cool as hell, I get excited, then I try to get them working on my gaming PC (that has the GPU), I spend 1-2h fighting with python and give up. Today's issue is that my python version is 3.12 instead of =3.9. Installing python 3.11 from the official website does nothing, I give up. It's a shame that the amazing work done by people like the OP gets underused because of this mess…

Let me introduce you to the beautiful world of virtual environments. They save you the headache of getting a full installation to run, especially when using Windows. I prefer miniconda, but venv also does the job.

`uv` is great for this because its super fast, works well as a globally installed tool (similar to conda), and can also download and manage multiple versions of python for you, and which version is used by which virtualenvironment.

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#214
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me introduce you to the beautiful world of virtual environments. They save you the headache of getting a full installation to run, especially when using Windows. I prefer miniconda, but venv also does the job.

Virtual environments with venv don't answer the python version problem unless you throw another tool into the mix.

conda and uv do manage python versions for you which is part of their appeal, especially on systems that don't make it super straightforward to install multiple different versions of pre-compiled runtimes because their official OS channel of installing python only offers one version. At least on macos, brew supports a number of recent versions that can be installed simultaneously.

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#215
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want that for privacy reasons and for resource reasons. And having this as a small hardware device should not add relevant latency to it.

Privacy isn't a concern when everything is local

Yes it is.

Malware, bugs etc can happen.

And I also might not want to disable it for every guest either.

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#216

Every time I see these things, they look cool as hell, I get excited, then I try to get them working on my gaming PC (that has the GPU), I spend 1-2h fighting with python and give up. Today's issue is that my python version is 3.12 instead of =3.9. Installing python 3.11 from the official website does nothing, I give up. It's a shame that the amazing work done by people like the OP gets underused because of this mess…

it isn't that hard, but also fiddling with python versions is something I don't mind sinking 2 hours into at work but can't tolerate doing for 10 minutes with my free time.

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read this if you haven’t already: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 That’s a much more serious anxiety trigger for me.

wow that was incredible. thank you for sharing it. why does it cause you anxiety?

Because the first ending seems more likely than the second.

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#218
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy isn't a concern when everything is local

Yes it is. Malware, bugs etc can happen. And I also might not want to disable it for every guest either.

If the AI is local, it doesn't need to be on an internet connected device. At that point, malware and bugs in that stack don't add extra privacy risks* — but malware and bugs in all your other devices with microphones etc. remain a risk, even if the LLM is absolutely perfect by whatever standard that means for you.

* unless you put the AI on a robot body, but that's then your own new and exciting problem.

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#219

Every time I see these things, they look cool as hell, I get excited, then I try to get them working on my gaming PC (that has the GPU), I spend 1-2h fighting with python and give up. Today's issue is that my python version is 3.12 instead of =3.9. Installing python 3.11 from the official website does nothing, I give up. It's a shame that the amazing work done by people like the OP gets underused because of this mess…

UV is the one final solution to Python problems. Install globally, then you're good to go.

Re: Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

#220
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy isn't a concern when everything is local

Yes it is. Malware, bugs etc can happen. And I also might not want to disable it for every guest either.

There is no privacy difference between a local LLM listening versus a local wake word model listening.
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