Show HN: I built a free CharacterAI that runs locally
Free, Local CharacterAI with inference on Apple Silicon and ESP32 WebSocket transport - akdeb/Elato-Local
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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.
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