Self-hosted house companion driven by a local LLM — voice, Home Assistant, and automations you talk into existence
richard-companion is an open-source, self-hosted home AI companion (v0.1.0) that runs entirely on your local hardware using a local large language model (LLM). It integrates with Home Assistant to give you voice-driven control over your smart home, letting you create and manage automations simply by speaking to it — no cloud services, no subscriptions, and no data leaving your network. Designed for privacy-conscious home automators, it combines speech recognition, a local LLM backend, and Home Assistant's ecosystem to deliver a fully private, conversational smart home experience.
Who it's for
home automation enthusiastsprivacy-conscious usersself-hosterssmart home tinkerersHome Assistant power users
Pricing · free
checked Jul 19, 2026
Plan
Price
Includes
Free / Open Source
$0 /mo
Completely free and open source · Self-hosted on your own hardware · No cloud dependencies or subscription fees · Bring your own local LLM (e.g. via Ollama, llama.cpp, etc.)
AI-researched pricing — verify on the official site before subscribing.
Use it for
— Voice-controlling smart home devices via Home Assistant
— Creating automations by describing them conversationally
— Running a fully local, private home assistant with no cloud reliance
— Querying the state of home devices using natural language
— Automating routines through spoken commands processed entirely on-device
Get the most out of it
01Run a capable local LLM (e.g. Mistral or LLaMA 3 via Ollama) on a machine with a dedicated GPU for the best voice-response latency.
02Ensure your Home Assistant long-lived access token has sufficient entity permissions so richard-companion can read and control all desired devices.
03Start with simple single-device automations to validate your setup before building complex multi-step routines.
04Use a high-quality USB microphone or a wake-word-capable device to improve voice recognition accuracy in noisy home environments.
05Check the project's changelog and GitHub issues regularly — at v0.1.0 it is early-stage software and updates may bring breaking changes or important new features.
Build the autonomous home assistant infrastructure before consumer robotics achieve mass adoption. Combines local LLM control with voice interfaces and cross-device orchestration to control robots, sensors, and traditional smart home devices.
How the workflow runs
01richard-companion — Deploy self-hosted voice-controlled home automation powered by local LLM
02enviouswispr — Enable sub-second on-device voice dictation for issuing commands to AI systems
03ailyn — Orchestrate AI intelligence across multiple devices and edge computing nodes in the home
04walkers2 — Integrate humanoid service robot for physical tasks once consumer models become available
05agent-native-cloud — Scale home AI infrastructure as more robotic and IoT devices come online
Physical AI and robotics are predicted to achieve breakthrough consumer adoption through home automation. This stack positions early adopters to control the entire ecosystem: voice input via EnviousWispr, local reasoning via Richard, cross-device orchestration via Ailyn, and future robot integration via WalkerS2. When consumer robots hit shelves, you'll have the control plane ready.
