Observed arrival · 2026-09-21
Parlour, the Mac-based voice assistant for your house
An open-source home voice assistant that runs its wake word, speech recognition, local model, and voice output on a Mac.
○Open
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$Paid
†Ads
✦Pretty
●Pro
◎Niche
◉Human
⚑Risk
ƒJS
- For
- Mac-owning Home Assistant users
- Worth noticing
- After 800 ms of quiet, Parlour stops recording; cloud fallback receives the sentence text, not the voice recording.
Field notes
Parlour separates the household voice path into replaceable providers: openWakeWord listens for activation, whisper.cpp handles transcription, a local model calls permitted Home Assistant tools, and Kokoro speaks the response. The homepage says recordings stop after 800 milliseconds of quiet and that cloud fallback sends only the spoken sentence as text. A single Mac keeps the models and keys while other Macs, phones, or custom boards can serve as room satellites.
Observed signals
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Editorial observations of this landing page, not a rating.
○OpenPublic substance visible
✦PrettyNotable craft visible
●ProPolished or operationally mature
◎NicheUnusually specific use
ƒJavaScriptBrowser-side code central
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