Yeah speech recognition doesn't require a full scale frontier level cloud LLM
You can run something like Whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper locally to transcribe the speech in about 1 second on a MiniPC, then check that for keywords
Then you can use something like Piper https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl to convert the reply back to speech. It's not quite as pretty sounding as something from eg ElevenLabs, but it works - on a mini PC it can handle voice in real time
I use both of those locally to run my own voice assistant for my smart home (indeed, Piper is made by Home Assistant for that exact purpose)
Obviously for a game they'd need more than one Mini PC - but you can scale it up for a lot less than $1k/day!
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u/audigex 1d ago
Yeah speech recognition doesn't require a full scale frontier level cloud LLM
You can run something like Whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper locally to transcribe the speech in about 1 second on a MiniPC, then check that for keywords
Then you can use something like Piper https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl to convert the reply back to speech. It's not quite as pretty sounding as something from eg ElevenLabs, but it works - on a mini PC it can handle voice in real time
I use both of those locally to run my own voice assistant for my smart home (indeed, Piper is made by Home Assistant for that exact purpose)
Obviously for a game they'd need more than one Mini PC - but you can scale it up for a lot less than $1k/day!