So there’s an answer, and then there’s a problem.

The easy answer is that Home Assistant has Voice Assistants now, and you can use Ollama, Whisper, and Piper to do that all locally.

The problem is that it really only talks to Home Assistant, there’s no ability to have it search the web, or make a phone call, or really anything else outside of Home Assistant without significant addon stuffs.

It also requires a reasonably significant amount of RAM on your computer to run the VM for Home Assistant while supporting Whisper and Piper and Ollama.

Agent voice response

It’s even mostly open source.

The simple answer is most desktop PCs will not come even close to that at idle. Even just having a few case fans may draw more than that, without involving the CPU at all.

Laptop devices can do that in some cases with their extra power management features.

That being said, do the math to see if it matters. The difference between 10w and 40w is 0.7kwh per day, at least where I live that’s about 7 cents or about $25 per year.

In my case it would be more expensive to purchase a dedicated low power device than it will save me in 4-5 years compared to just using something I already have laying around.

Why?

You aren’t going to find a useful AI system for personal use in Finance, you simply don’t have the scale needed to benefit from it. You don’t make enough transactions per month that looking over it yourself is going to be any slower than reading the AI summary.

The question as with most process optimization and data analysis is, what’s the actual result you’re hoping for? If you want it to be able to summarize WALMART, WAL-MART and WMART so you can see those numbers added together, you already know you spent a lot at Walmart. Whare are you going to actually do with that information?

Saving money doesn’t really need an AI, there really aren’t many ways to cut budgets down short of paying attention to the most obvious spending problems (Too much housing, too much vehicle, too much food (especially eating out), and too much entertainment(too many subscription platforms))

It’s usually a far better investment of time to improve your earning power (upskill, change jobs, add hours, etc.)

Cutting $40 per month from your budget by not going to the movies every week just isn’t going to have the impact you need in your life.

Even if you could shave off 50% at idle, you’re talking about like $0.10 per day in power savings. Is it really worth spending any time on that?

Hand sanitizer frequently works too.