Voice AI on k3s: Whisper, Piper, and openWakeWord in Kubernetes
TL;DR I deployed Whisper (speech-to-text), Piper (text-to-speech), and openWakeWord (wake word detection) as Kubernetes workloads on my k3s cluster. Home Assistant connects to them over the Wyoming protocol for fully local voice pipelines. Total resource cost: ~1 CPU core and 1.75GB RAM. Total cloud cost: $0. Why run voice services in Kubernetes Home Assistant’s voice pipeline needs three things: something to listen for a wake word, something to transcribe speech, and something to speak back. The usual approach is running these on the same box as HA, or on a dedicated Pi. Both work fine until you want the services to survive node failures, be independently upgradeable, or share resources with other workloads. ...