Wednesday — a Python voice assistant with a cold personality

Why I built this

I've watched Iron Man too many times. JARVIS and later FRIDAY were the AI assistants I always wanted — always-on, voice-first, dry, actually useful. Modern LLMs plus decent TTS/STT finally made that pattern buildable for one person.

Off-the-shelf assistants like Siri or Alexa are competent but generic. I wanted something with a distinct personality — not the eager helper, not the corporate-friendly voice. Something that felt like it had a mind of its own.

The character

Wednesday Addams. Cold. Dry. Direct. Doesn't sugarcoat, doesn't apologize when the answer is “you're wrong.” Occasionally deadpan-funny in a way that makes the interaction memorable.

It's enforced through the system prompt — no hedging, no unnecessary pleasantries, no “as an AI language model” preamble. If the answer is short, it's short. If the answer is that I made a mistake, that's what she says. And in voice, you actually hear that tone.

What it does today

Voice loop over LLM APIs. I speak, she listens, she answers back. Python for the loop, STT for capturing what I said, TTS for her voice.

Voice-first changes the constraints:

• Responses have to sound right when spoken, not just read right
• Long answers get truncated or summarized — nobody wants a monologue
• Filler words like “actually” and “essentially” pile up quickly in TTS, so they get stripped from the prompt

What I'd expand

• Long-term memory across sessions so she actually gets to know me
• Tool use (calendar, email, code exec) — the jump from “answers” to “acts”
• Wake word for hands-free trigger
• Voice tuning — the character is 90% prompt, 10% voice, and the voice part still has room

Live-in-progress build, not a finished product.

Takeaway

The gap between generic AI and an AI with a distinct personality is smaller than I expected. Most of it is prompt engineering and voice-response design — rhythm, brevity, tone. Not model quality.

That's a good sign for personal tools. The intelligence is a commodity now. The character isn't.