Most to-do list apps are just another screen competing for your attention. Task Agent takes a different approach — a small AI orb that lives quietly on your desktop and only speaks when you ask it to. Say a custom wake phrase, ask what you've missed or what's due today, and it replies out loud — reasoning over your real task list using a local LLM. Speech recognition, task logic, and AI reasoning all run on your machine. No cloud, no API keys, nothing leaves your device.

Hey everyone 👋 I'm a 2nd year CS student, and I built this because I kept forgetting what I'd actually finished each day — DSA problems, project work, interview prep, learning new frameworks. I wanted something that would just tell me, out loud, without opening another app to check. The build took a lot of dead ends worth mentioning: Chrome's Web Speech API doesn't work reliably inside Electron (Chromium lacks Chrome's private API key), so I switched to Vosk for offline speech recognition. Then discovered the popular Node.js Vosk binding is broken on modern Windows, so I ended up bridging to Python's official Vosk package via a subprocess instead. Packaging it as a real installer surfaced a whole new set of issues around file paths and permissions that never show up in dev mode. Tech stack: Node.js + Express backend, Electron for the transparent always-on-top orb UI, Python + Vosk for offline speech-to-text, and Ollama (Llama 3.2) for local LLM reasoning over the task data. Everything runs 100% offline — no API keys, no cloud costs, no data leaving your machine. Setup takes about 5 minutes after installing (Ollama + a speech model, both free) — full step-by-step instructions in the README. Would love feedback, and happy to go deep on the architecture with anyone curious about the debugging journey!

finally a to-do app that does not demand my attention every five minutes, the desktop orb idea is genuinely clever and the local-only approach is a nice bonus.

IRA

An offline voice AI that lives on your desktop

An offline voice AI that lives on your desktop