Building voice agents with Nvidia open models (daily.co)

I've been using festival under Linux.

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/festival.1....

But it is quite old now and pre-dates the DL/AI era.

Does anybody know of a good modern replacement that I can "apt install"?

These have gotten good enough to really make command-by-voice interactions pleasant. I'd love to try this with Cursor - just use it fully with voice.

This is perfect for me. I just started working on the voice related stuff for my agent framework and this will be of real use. Thanks.

There's also the excellent also open source unmute.sh. which alas is also Nvidia only at this point. https://unmute.sh/

It supports Turing T4, but not Ampere…

<pedantic>Voice recognition identifies who you are, speech recognition identifies what you say. </pedantic>

Example:

Voice recognition: arrrrrrgh! (Oh, I know that guy. He always gets irritated when someone uses terms speech and voice recognition wrong)

Speech Recognition: "Why can't you guys keep it straight? It is as simple as knowing the difference between hypothesis and theory."

Can't wait for this to land in MacWhisper. I like the idea of the streaming dictation especially when dictating long prompts to Claude Code.

Do any of the top models let you pause and think while speaking? I have to speak non-stop to Gemini assitant and ChatGPT, which is very very useless/unnatural for voice mode. Specially for non-english speakers probably. I sometimes have to think more to translate my thoughts to english.