I built a free CharacterAI that runs locally
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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.
HN · launched Mar 25, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 51%) · 0 views
Niche: conversational ai platforms · 84 launches, 8 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 84 launches in conversational ai platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes The software is a local Mac desktop wrapper tying together existing open-source MLX audio and LLM weights (e.g. F5-TTS, Whisper, and Llama) into a simple voice chat UI.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Elato AI DevKit
Feature requests: Pre-wired ESP32 kit with speaker/LED/button/amp included
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 618 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #278 of 619 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 138 days after the earliest competitor.
- Run AI chat, image gen, vision, and voice offline on your Mac · hn · 2026-06-29 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- VoxAster · github · 2026-10-04 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- VoxConvo · hn · 2025-11-07 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- yovoice · github · 2026-09-15 · 66 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- VoicedByMe · ph · 2026-10-18 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Local Character · ph · 2026-10-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- MWT Voice · ph · 2026-11-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- SpeechGenAI: AI Voice Studio · ph · 2026-10-11 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
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