Show HN: I built a free CharacterAI that runs locally

Show HN: I built a free CharacterAI that runs locally(github.com)

8 points by akadeb 99 days ago | 4 comments

CharacterAI has over 20M active users and lets people talk to AI voice clones. I built a local alternative that clones any voice with <10s of audio and can talk fluently in over 10 languages, and runs locally on your Macbook or Mac mini.

The voice pipeline currently supports MLX on any M1 through M5 chip. I used Whisper-Turbo for STT, Qwen3.5-9B-4bit for the LLM and Qwen3-TTS-0.6B-4bit for TTS.

The repo also has a Websocket Transport to add these voices to devices powered by the ESP32 via secure websockets.

BorisMelnik 99 days ago |

also I'm not a hardware hacker - are there any ESP32 kits with the speaker / led / button / amp already wired or in a kit at least? (that you recommend for this)

akadeb 99 days ago | |

Yeah I sell one here https://www.elatoai.com/products/ai-devkit If you pre-order on the link I can ship you one at a discount

BorisMelnik 99 days ago |

wow really cool, I browsed the repo but couldnt find what you used for the case on the ESP?

akadeb 99 days ago | |

Thanks Boris! The case is made out of Resin but I started with PLA. Will post the open-sourced STEP files there