Unleash the power of artificial intelligence right from your Mac by building a completely offline voice assistant leveraging the Mistral 7b model with the Ollama platform and Whisper speech recognition. In this guide, we will walk you through the installation, setup, and enhancement of your voice assistant, as well as how to troubleshoot common issues. So, let’s get started!

Installation Steps

Follow these simple steps to install and run your Offline Voice Assistant:

• Step 1: Install Ollama on your Mac.
• Step 2: Download the Mistral 7b model by running the ollama pull mistral command in your terminal.
• Step 3: Download an OpenAI Whisper Model (base.en works fine for basic functionality).
• Step 4: Clone the ollama-voice-mac repository to a directory of your choice.
• Step 5: Place the Whisper model in a whisper directory within the root folder of your cloned repository.
• Step 6: Ensure that you have Python and Pip installed.
• Step 7: For Apple silicon support of the PyAudio library, install Homebrew and run brew install portaudio.
• Step 8: Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install necessary dependencies.
• Step 9: Launch the assistant by running python assistant.py.

Improving the Voice Quality

If you’re looking to improve the voice quality of your assistant, follow these steps:

1. Go to System Settings and select Accessibility.
2. Navigate to Spoken Content.
3. In the System Voice section, select Manage Voices….
4. For English, locate and download Zoe (Premium) voice.
5. Set Zoe (Premium) as your system voice.

Adding Support for Other Languages

Expanding your assistant’s capabilities to support other languages is easy. Just follow these simple instructions:

1. Edit the assistant.yaml file within your cloned directory.
2. Download a corresponding Whisper model for your desired language.
3. Update the modelPath in the assistant.yaml file to point to your newly downloaded model.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Encountering issues while setting up or using your voice assistant? Here are some troubleshooting ideas:

• Installation Problems: Ensure that Python and Pip are installed. Check your internet connection to download necessary models.
• Voice Quality Issues: Make sure you’ve selected the right system voice (like Zoe) and that it’s downloaded correctly.
• Model Not Found: Verify that the Whisper model is correctly placed in the designated whisper directory.

For more insights, updates, or to collaborate on AI development projects, stay connected with fxis.ai.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you now have a fully functional offline voice assistant on your Mac! By following the outlined steps and tips, you can enhance your assistant’s performance and tailor it to your needs. At fxis.ai, we believe that such advancements are crucial for the future of AI, as they enable more comprehensive and effective solutions. Our team is continually exploring new methodologies to push the envelope in artificial intelligence, ensuring that our clients benefit from the latest technological innovations.