Oh, I didn't get that it's supposed to always be listening. Maybe I'm not the target audience but I wouldn't want that anyways. If that's important, that might be a good reason. I think this needs to change in the future though if AI agents are supposed to become popular, I can't imagine buying separate hardware every time. Either the integration in the OS needs to become better or Google/Apple will monopolize the market and be the only options.

> Oh, I didn't get that it's supposed to always be listening. Maybe I'm not the target audience but I wouldn't want that anyways.

I don't know about this project, but generally when a voice assistant is "always listening" they mean it's sitting in a low power state listening for a very specific trigger like "Hey Siri" or "OK Google" and literally nothing else. As much as they would probably like to have it really listening all the time, the technology to have a portable device run actual speech recognition and parsing at all times with useful battery life doesn't really exist yet.

You are right, “always listening" they mean it's sitting in a low power state listening for a very specific trigger like "Hey Siri" or "OK Google" and literally nothing else.

Yes it does. Having a hot mic hooked up to a local model for transcription is well within our capabilities. All you'd need is OpenAI whisper on a high end smartphone and you're good for a couple of hours. Throw in a battery bank the size of a smartphone to get a couple more hours. If you built custom hardware, like they did here, you could easily build something that lasts an entire day.

Yes, I thought it was button-triggered.

If you have a separate -dedicated- Android smartphone for this task, why wouldn't the app run in the foreground?

In some sense this is what, Rabbit R1 tried to do. they just shipped a low end custom android skin in a new formfactor so that they own the platform. Didn't go well for them

> The platforms (ios, Android, etc.) are very limiting.

I'm not sure what that "etc" is supposed to mean, but GNU/Linux phones run desktop OS and impose no artificial limits on you.