Building a Real Voice AI Assistant with Claude: Architecture and 3 Critical Bugs
No_Rush5021 · reddit · 2026-07-31
The author shares the complete architecture and debugging experience of building a practical personal voice AI assistant using Claude.
Core Loop: Local wake word → recording with silence detection → local Whisper transcription → Claude with tools → streamed voice reply.
Key Designs:
- Memory: Split into fixed identity prompts, live context, and durable facts (append-only plain text).
- Tool Safety: Read is free; reversible writes execute directly; irreversible actions (send, refund) only generate human-review drafts.
- Sub-agents: With 30+ tools, a cheap classifier model routes requests to specialist agents to maintain accuracy.
3 Critical Bugs:
- Self-interruption: Mic heard the speaker; fixed via Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC).
- Silent wake-word death: Dependency drift caused silent garbage output with no errors.
- Total freeze: Opening two audio streams on the same mic triggered a low-level Core Audio deadlock.
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