I have a longstanding view that the best personal assistant is one you write for yourself: It can cover your needs and respond to how you'd prefer to interact with it. A lot of sophistication isn't needed because it doesn't have to try to meet a lowest common denominator user.

Absolutely. I think hackability is the best part of open source.

I really hope SNIPS manages to launch some hardware like the Echo at an affordable price point. Their current kit is too expensive but the Echo sucks and I much prefer writing my own intents on an open source system that runs on-device.

Snips is totally Cloud based and proprietary as far as I can tell. Leon has offline capabilities and also the ability to switch between different cloud providers.

I got the impression snips was offline.

Right I just looked again and they have an online tool for building assistants or something but it does seem to run offline.

You might like project naomi.

For the lazy: https://github.com/NaomiProject/Naomi