Why Run a Voice Assistant on the Edge? Running speech‑to‑text and intent detection locally gives you: Zero latency – no round‑trip to the cloud. Privacy – audio never leaves the device. Offline reliability – your assistant works even when the internet is down. In this tutorial we’ll stitch together OpenAI’s Whisper (small model) for transcription, a tiny TensorFlow Lite intent classifier, and a real‑time audio pipeline that lives entirely on a Raspberry Pi 4 (2 GB or more). By the end you’ll have a Python script that listens for commands like “turn on the lamp” and executes a local function instantly.…