https://arashtaher.com/tags/audio/ Recent content in Audio on Arash Taher Hugo en-us Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:07:00 +0000 https://arashtaher.com/blog/always-on-listening-for-an-offline-voice-assistant/ Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:07:00 +0000 https://arashtaher.com/blog/always-on-listening-for-an-offline-voice-assistant/ <p>This is the second post in the series on creating an offline voice assistant. The <a href="https://arashtaher.com/blog/learning-local-llms-for-an-offline-voice-assistant/">first post</a> covered the learning path. This one covers the initial steps for an always-on listening application.</p> <h2 id="capture-then-transcribe">Capture, then transcribe</h2> <p>I started by recording audio in 5-second blocks after a wake word, saving each block as a <code>.wav</code> file, then sending it to another process to be transcribed with <code>whisper.cpp</code>. I used <code>PyAudio</code> for capture and a locally compiled <code>whisper.cpp</code> binary with the <code>tiny.en</code> model. The Whisper call was a new process via Python&rsquo;s <code>subprocess</code> module.</p>