Everything a voice assistant should do —
and nothing leaves your network.
Voice assistants need low-latency speech-to-text, reliable intent detection and safe action execution. Most deployments get there by outsourcing inference to a third-party API, which is exactly what a regulated client cannot do. VoiceDesk runs entirely on a self-managed VM inside the customer boundary with controlled network egress. Whisper handles speech-to-text with streaming output, so the transcript appears incrementally and the interaction feels conversational rather than laggy.
Intent detection routes each utterance to a structured action candidate, and a policy layer validates permissions before any app operation is invoked — intent, then policy check, then execution, never in a different order. Private retrieval over a local vector database answers app-specific questions and surfaces navigation steps. Multilingual support routes intent in a language-aware way rather than translating first and losing the meaning.
The design constraint was absolute: zero third-party inference dependency.
That ruled out the easy path and forced open-weight models (Whisper for STT, Llama/Mistral for reasoning) running under Docker on the customer VM. The engineering challenge became latency — keeping a self-hosted end-to-end voice loop under two seconds on hardware we did not choose.
VoiceDesk delivers an end-to-end voice loop in under two seconds, with 85% of tasks completable via voice suggestions, multilingual support, and — the number that mattered most to the client — zero third-party inference dependency. Every inference endpoint stays inside the customer VM boundary.