Show HN: Audio-chat-box – offline speech in and out for any program, over stdio

Category: ai-ml

Tags: speech-to-text, text-to-speech, offline, rust, json-rpc, ai

Score: 6.8/10 (Innovation: 6, Technical: 7, Documentation: 8, Utility: 6)

audio-chat-box is a Rust-based offline speech-to-text and text-to-speech service that communicates over stdio using JSON-RPC, allowing any program to add voice capabilities without handling audio devices or cloud APIs. It leverages sherpa-onnx with Kokoro, Parakeet, and Silero VAD models, and supports hotwords for domain-specific vocabulary. Its clean protocol and self-contained model management make it a practical building block for local-first AI applications.

Target audience: backend devs, AI application developers

Repository: https://github.com/cjus/audio-chat-box · Rust · Apache-2.0 · 1 stars

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