Gemma 4 12B QAT + faster Qwen 3 TTS fits perfectly fine in 12GB VRAM and can be used to create a fully local voice assistant with ... reconizeable traits ;)
I see Youtubers trying to do similar things every now and then but for some reason their latencies always seem a lot higher than I would expect so if the one I've conjured up (based on Huggingface's Speech-to-Speech project initially) is special somehow then maybe it's of interest to others.
This solution is fully open source - and the components used for SST/LLM/TTS are freely exchangeable. Latency goes down if one has the ability to use a separate SST like Parakeet instead of reusing the LLM for it as I do in this video.
My scope is "what me and family wants" - Home-Assistant is one of the tools the LLM lists (pool pump sensor comes from there). The server takes an mcp.json so any tool that has an MCP connector can be used.
Haven't thought a graphical avatar, but I am a Red Dwarf fan and I've already thought about the ability to have pre-configured "themes" for the system (Star Trek, HAL, Holly etc) - although not something I can host and publish due to ... waves hands ... IP rights.