Run your home
“Turn off the bedroom lights.”
Control lights, locks, scenes and more through Home Assistant — by voice, from any room.
// Private · Whole-home · Open source
An AI-enabled voice assistant for every room.
Kenzy puts a voice assistant in every room of your home — one that knows which room you're in, recognizes who's talking, and can answer the whole house at once. It's powered by the AI you choose — a model on your own machine or a provider you pick — and runs on hardware you own, so your voice never has to leave the building. No account, no subscription, no company listening in.
$ curl -fsSL https://kenzy.dev/install.sh | bash
See what it can do ↓
// installs on Linux in one command — or step through it manually on Get Started
Every room
One assistant
Private
Your voice stays home
Your choice
Local or cloud AI
Knows you
Recognizes your voice
// What it can do
Just talk — in any room.
No app, no remote, no phone. Say the wake word and ask. Kenzy works out which room you're in and who's asking, then does the thing or answers out loud.
Ask anything
“How long do I boil an egg?”
Your own AI answers — running on your machine or a provider you choose.
Tell the house
“Let everyone know dinner's ready.”
Kenzy speaks your message aloud in every room at once.
Personal
“Add milk to my list.”
It recognizes your voice, so reminders and answers can be yours, not the household's.
Instant
“What's the weather?”
Everyday questions answer the moment you finish — no waiting, no cloud round-trip.
Yours to extend
“Start movie night.”
Teach Kenzy new tricks with a few lines of Python — your routines, your way.
// In every room
One assistant, all over the house.
Put a small speaker-mic in each room and they all share one AI brain. Kenzy keeps track of which room you spoke in and who you are — so “turn on the lights” means these lights, and the reply comes back in your room.
Every room
Start small, grow anytime
A cheap little node per room, all managed from one place. Begin with one and add rooms whenever.
Room-aware
Knows where you are
Ask in the kitchen and it acts in the kitchen — context follows the room, not a single gadget.
Knows you
Recognizes who's talking
Enrolled voices get personal answers, and sensitive actions can require the right person.
Announce & intercom
Reach the whole house
“Tell everyone dinner's ready” plays in every room at once — or call one room from another for a two-way intercom.
01 Why local
Your voice never has to leave the house.
Most assistants ship every word you say to a server you don't control. Kenzy flips that: because kenzy-llm runs on LiteLLM, you can point it at a model running on your own box — Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM — or a cloud provider if you'd rather. Your call, per service.
Private
Stays on your LAN
Audio, transcripts, and model calls can all run inside your own network. No third party in the loop unless you put one there.
Open model
Bring your own LLM
LiteLLM speaks to local runtimes and every major provider. Swap models with one line of YAML — no rewiring.
No meter
No per-word bills
Run it on hardware you already own and the marginal cost of "what's the weather?" is electricity, not API credits.
Hackable
Yours to take apart
Plain Python, readable configs, and a one-file skill system. Built to be tinkered with, not locked down.
02 What's inside
A real assistant, assembled from parts you can see.
kenzy-node
On-device wake word
openWakeWord runs on every frame locally, with an optional Silero VAD gate to kill false triggers. Train and drop in your own wake word.
kenzy-speaker
Knows who's talking
SpeechBrain ECAPA-TDNN identifies enrolled speakers — so unlocking the front door by voice can require a recognized person.
kenzy-llm
Skills & tool-calling
Drop an async function in skills/, decorate it with @skill, and the model calls it as a tool. No registration, no boilerplate.
fast path
Instant commands
Common phrases like "turn on the lights" resolve deterministically — no model round-trip — so they answer the moment you finish speaking.
v3 · GROUND-UP REWRITE
Rebuilt from the ground up.
Kenzy v3 is a complete redesign — not a refactor. The monolith is gone, replaced by six small services that each do one job and talk over a simple WebSocket protocol.
The result is a system you can spread across the house: a featherweight node on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W in each room, the heavy lifting on a server or workstation wherever you've got the horsepower.
- More flexible — run every service on one box or scatter them across the network.
- More responsive — a deterministic fast path skips the LLM for everyday commands.
- Edge-ready — nodes do only wake word + capture, so they fit tiny hardware.
# point Kenzy at a model on your own machine model: "ollama/llama3.1" base_url: "http://localhost:11434" # ...or a cloud provider, same two lines # model: "gpt-4o" # model: "claude-opus-4-8"
Ollama
LM Studio
vLLM
OpenAI
Anthropic
any LiteLLM provider
// How it works
Listens, thinks, answers.
Step 1 · Hears you
Wakes on your word
A small speaker-mic in the room catches the wake word on the device itself — nothing is sent anywhere until you actually call on it.
Step 2 · Thinks
Works out what you meant
Your words become text and your chosen AI figures out the request — and which room and which person it came from.
Step 3 · Acts
Does it, and answers
It runs the command — your lights, a question, an announcement — and speaks the reply back in your room.
// Common questions
The honest answers.
Privacy
Does it work without the internet?
Yes — wake word, speech, and the AI can all run on your own hardware, so it keeps working without the cloud. Prefer a cloud AI model? You can opt into one, piece by piece.
Cost
Do I need an account or subscription?
No. There's no Kenzy account and no monthly fee — you run it on hardware you already own.
Smart home
Does it work with my smart home?
Yes, through Home Assistant — control lights, locks, scenes and more by voice, from any room.
Hardware
What do I need to run it?
The room nodes are designed to run on small single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi, paired with a speakerphone that has echo cancellation. You'll also want one more capable machine for the server and AI — or point the AI at a cloud model. See the hardware guide in the docs for tested boards.
Music
Can it play music in every room?
It's on the roadmap — multi-room music is a feature we're working on. For now, you can pair Kenzy with Home Assistant and Music Assistant for whole-home audio.
Setup
Is it hard to set up?
One command installs it on Linux. There's a full manual path too, and a web dashboard to manage every room once it's running.
// Bring it home
Stand up your own voice assistant.
Install it, run the services you need, point it at your hardware, and start talking. The docs walk you through every step.