A voice assistant that runs on your own machine is a nice weekend story. You talk, Whisper transcribes, a local LLM works out what you meant, a skill answers, Piper speaks. No cloud, no account, nothing leaves the room.

Then you try to put it in a hotel room and every assumption breaks.

On your desk there's one user, one microphone, one trusted network, and one person who knows what the assistant can and can't do. A hotel has a hundred rooms, a guest who checks out on Tuesday and a stranger who checks in on Wednesday, a Wi-Fi network shared with every phone in the building, staff who need to see requests instead of hearing them, and nobody who will tell the assistant to "try again" when it goes quiet.

Our last release, v0.4.0, is 29 commits and a few thousand lines of Rust and C++ that deal with that gap.…