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Whisplay offline voice assistant

A battery-powered Pi 5 voice assistant that works offline.

Full build guide

Whisplay offline voice assistant
No photo in the source; GitHub repository card, served from HardwareLab.

By Jdaie Lin

View original on GitHub View original on localclaw.io
Posted
GitHub stars
527 (GitHub)

Build sheet

Board
Raspberry Pi 5 8GB
Other parts
PiSugar Whisplay HAT (LCD/mics/speaker/button), PiSugar 3 Plus 5000mAh, active cooler
AI model or service
Whisper STT, Ollama Qwen3:1.7b, Piper TTS
Runs offline?
Yes, per the source
Difficulty
Beginner

Overview

PiSugar Whisplay HAT + PiSugar 3 Plus battery build runs Whisper, Qwen3 1.7B via Ollama, and Piper entirely on a Pi 5 8GB after models are cached—documented portable offline assistant.

How it works

Press the button and speak: Whisper STT -> Qwen3 1.7B on Ollama -> Piper TTS, on a Pi 5 with the PiSugar Whisplay HAT and battery.

Why it's interesting

Whisplay AI Chatbot is a push-to-talk pocket device: press the button, speak, and it talks back. The README's hardware list is short: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, or a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM recommended for the offline build, the PiSugar Whisplay HAT (which carries the LCD, speaker and microphone) and a PiSugar 3 battery, 1200 mAh, or the 5000 mAh Plus version for the Pi 5. Pre-built images are in the project wiki. Building yourself means installing the Whisplay HAT audio drivers first, then running the install, an interactive config wizard for the .env file, a build and the service. Note that enabling start-on-boot disables the graphical interface and puts the Pi in multi-user mode. There are separate tutorial videos for the offline Pi 5 version.

Source: github.com/PiSugar/whisplay-ai-chatbot#readme

Hardware

  • Raspberry Pi 5 8GB
  • PiSugar Whisplay HAT (LCD/mics/speaker/button)
  • PiSugar 3 Plus 5000mAh
  • active cooler

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