I too am super interested in an offline-only voice assistant but really don't want to bother with setting up a mic connected to a pi. Even tough it's not super hard, it'll never be as good as the commercially available options. I think this project would really benefit from taking one of the excellent existing voice assistant/speakers on the market (Google home, echo dots, etc., and flashing them with some custom fir…
Would love to have great hardware for custom tinkering though. With more development time and money behind this project, I hope it could grow into a great tool.