Strawberry Alternatives

strawberry reviews and mentions

• OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 May 2026

  The whole setup works on my M2 MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM. I use Gemma 4B via LiteRT-LM.

  I've found that LiteRT-LM has a much lower DRAM footprint than Ollama. I've also made tons of optimizations in the code - for eg, you can do quite a bit with a 16k context window for a voice assistant while managing a good footprint, so I keep track of the token usage and then perform an auto-compaction after a while. I use sub-agents and only do deep-think calls with them, so the context window is separated out. In a multi-turn conversation, if Gemma 4 directly processes audio input, the KV cache fills up within a few turns, so I channel it all via Whisper.

  I did not want to use openWakeWord or Picovoice because they had limitations on which wake word you could choose. Alternative was to train a model of my own. So I created my own wake word detection pipeline using Whisper Tiny - works surprisingly well: https://github.com/pncnmnp/strawberry/blob/main/main.py#L143...

  Also, I have VAD going with smart turn v3 (like I mentioned above) + I use browser/websocket for AEC + Barge-in (https://github.com/pncnmnp/strawberry/blob/main/audio_ws.py).

  I'm using the MacBook's built-in microphones for this, though, and I haven't fully tested it with other microphones. I've been ironing out the rough edges on a daily basis. I should write a quick blog on this too.