I built a free CharacterAI that runs locally
Details
- External ID
- 47515381
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a free CharacterAI that runs locally
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.491389913899139
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- voice dictation and control tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- local character ai alternative
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 238 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #113 of 239 (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 0.54
- VoxConvo · hn · 2025-11-07 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- yovoice · github · 2026-09-15 · 66 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- A free online British accent generator for instant voice conversion · hn · 2026-02-12 · 25 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Sovereign Voice · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- m’kay · ph · 2026-09-30 · 75 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Local-AI-Voice-Studio · github · 2026-09-13 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- mlx-AuK · github · 2026-09-12 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.