Johannes Kresner
bba0095bc0
Establish the monorepo, tooling, and starter apps so UI and gateway development can begin from a documented, runnable baseline.
2.2 KiB
2.2 KiB
Vela Overview
Objective
Vela is a fully local, voice-first assistant system with:
- local-first architecture and no mandatory cloud dependencies
- natural TTS output via Kokoro
- voice-driven interaction as the primary interface
- integrations with Home Assistant and SearXNG
- a lightweight SvelteKit PWA
- remote LLM inference via Ollama on a NAS
Core Design Principles
Voice-first
- UI optimized for speaking instead of typing
- minimal visual clutter
- real-time feedback through partial transcripts and streaming responses
Local-first
- no required cloud APIs
- all services self-hosted
- browser used for capture and playback only
Tool-driven intelligence
- the LLM does not directly control external systems
- all external actions route through explicit tools
Low-latency interaction
- streaming STT partial results
- streaming LLM token output
- streaming TTS audio chunks
- interruptible responses
Product Scope
Primary Interface
- browser-based PWA
- push-to-talk interaction
- transcript and response display
- playback of streamed or returned audio
Secondary Screens
/history/settings/admin
These screens are lower priority than the main voice loop and should be implemented after the core interaction path is stable.
Repository Layout
apps/vela-ui— minimal SvelteKit browser UIapps/vela-gateway— minimal Fastify gateway servicedocs/— technical documentation and phased backlog
Use Yarn workspaces from the repository root to manage these packages.
Primary User Flow
User presses mic
→ audio streaming starts
→ transcript appears
→ final transcript sent
→ assistant processes
→ response streams as text and audio
→ user can interrupt anytime
Non-Goals for v1
- full conversational memory system
- emotion simulation or personality modeling
- multi-user identity separation
- offline LLM on the NanoPi
- wake word and other future extensions listed in architecture docs