Is there a local AI home assistant I can run on my own hardware?
7 November 2026
Yes. B.A.I.S. (Bespoke AI Systems) is a self-hosted voice assistant for the smart home that runs on hardware you own and control, rather than a cloud account you're renting access to. It's built and used daily in a real UK home — not a demo that only exists for a pitch.
What makes a home assistant "local"?
A local-first home assistant keeps the parts that matter — your voice, your camera feeds, your household data — on hardware in your own house, instead of sending them to a vendor's servers for every interaction. B.A.I.S. runs its speech, vision and language models on local compute (a dedicated rig in the household it serves), so a conversation doesn't have to leave the building to be understood or answered.
How is this different from Home Assistant Assist or a cloud voice assistant?
Home Assistant Assist and similar open-source voice pipelines are strong at device control — turning things on and off, running scripts — and B.A.I.S. integrates with that ecosystem directly rather than replacing it. The difference is scope: B.A.I.S. is built as a continuously-running presence with a consistent persona across sessions, hybrid wake-word detection that tolerates natural, imperfect speech, camera-aware vision for describing and reasoning about what's in a room, and mobile access — on top of, not instead of, the smart-home gear a household already has.
What can a self-hosted voice assistant for the smart home actually do in 2025–2026?
In day-to-day use that means: spoken commands that don't need to be exact (interruptions and rephrasing are tolerated, not just clean trigger phrases), room-aware control of lighting and media across an existing device fleet, document and office tasks (OCR, spreadsheets, LibreOffice) handled locally, and a voice/personality that stays the same assistant from one conversation to the next instead of resetting.
Do I need special hardware to self-host a home AI assistant?
You need a machine capable of running the voice, vision and language models continuously — in B.A.I.S.'s case a dedicated local rig rather than a Raspberry Pi doing the heavy lifting alone (a Pi-class board can front a wake-word listener, but the models themselves want a real GPU/CPU budget to stay fast). This is the trade-off against cloud assistants: more hardware up front, nothing metered per request afterwards, and no dependency on a vendor's uptime or pricing changes.
Frequently asked questions
Is B.A.I.S. open source?
B.A.I.S. is a commercial system built by B.A.I.S. UK LTD, not an open-source project you'd clone and self-build from scratch — but it's designed around the same local-first principle that drives projects like Home Assistant and OpenVoiceOS: your data and your models stay on your own machine.
Can it work alongside Home Assistant?
Yes — B.A.I.S. integrates with existing home-automation platforms and device fleets rather than asking a household to rip out what already works.
Does it need an internet connection?
Core voice, vision and automation functions run locally and keep working without one; anything that genuinely needs the open internet (web lookups, some integrations) is called explicitly, not by default.
Who is this for?
Households and small businesses who want an always-on assistant with real continuity and local privacy, and are comfortable running it on dedicated hardware rather than a phone app tied to someone else's cloud.
Related on B.A.I.S.
- What B.A.I.S. actually does
- What "local-first AI" actually means, and why it's harder to fake than it sounds
- What does local-first AI mean?
Want to see it running? Talk to us about a B.A.I.S. install