Typing to an assistant is fine, but I’m a voice memo person, so I wanted the assistant to meet me halfway.

The main chat is Telegram, which I’m in all day anyway. From there it can do everything: run automations, answer from its knowledge graph, send me the deal list, whatever. But there are layers on top now.

Voice memos. I can dictate a note and it gets transcribed locally with faster-whisper and filed into the knowledge graph. No cloud, no third party hearing my half-formed thoughts. The transcription runs on my own GPU, which feels like the right trade: private stuff stays home.

Phone calls. There’s a voice agent (built on Vapi) so the assistant can actually handle a call. Still early days, but it’s wild hearing it hold a conversation. The plan is for it to take the calls I don’t want and brief me on what it sorted.

iMessage and SMS. Both bridged in, because half my family and most of my clients live on the other side of my chat apps. The iMessage bridge is the fiddliest piece of the whole setup and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, but it means the assistant can text me (and I can text it) from anywhere.

The morning briefing arrives as a voice-friendly summary too, which is the closest thing I’ve built to being read the paper.

Honest verdict on the voice layer: the transcription is 90% of the value, and it’s the part nobody sees. Talking to an assistant is a party trick. Being able to think out loud and have it actually captured, organised and remembered, that’s the real thing.