Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?
dsrtslnd23 Friday, January 23, 2026I’m trying to do the “voice assistant” thing fully locally: mic → model → speaker, low latency, ideally streaming + interruptible (barge-in).
Qwen3 Omni looks perfect on paper (“real-time”, speech-to-speech, etc). But I’ve been poking around and I can’t find a single reproducible “here’s how I got the open weights doing real speech-to-speech locally” writeup. Lots of “speech in → text out” or “audio out after the model finishes”, but not a usable realtime voice loop. Feels like either (a) the tooling isn’t there yet, or (b) I’m missing the secret sauce.
What are people actually using in 2026 if they want open + local voice?
Is anyone doing true end-to-end speech models locally (streaming audio out), or is the SOTA still “streaming ASR + LLM + streaming TTS” glued together?
If you did get Qwen3 Omni speech-to-speech working: what stack (transformers / vLLM-omni / something else), what hardware, and is it actually realtime?
What’s the most “works today” combo on a single GPU?
Bonus: rough numbers people see for mic → first audio back
Would love pointers to repos, configs, or “this is the one that finally worked for me” war stories.