LAION Launches BUD-E: A Fully Open Voice Assistant with Advanced Language Models

German nonprofit LAION has announced the launch of its new project, BUD-E, a fully open voice assistant designed to run on consumer hardware. The initiative aims to create a voice assistant with an architecture that can leverage emerging GenAI technologies, such as large language models (LLMs), to provide a more natural and engaging conversational experience for users. LAION’s goal is to ensure that every component of BUD-E can be integrated with apps and services license-free, including commercially. The project, in collaboration with the Ellis Institute, tech consultancy Collabora, and the Tübingen AI Center, has an ambitious roadmap that includes building emotional intelligence and multi-speaker conversation capabilities into BUD-E. Despite the existence of numerous open source voice assistants, LAION believes that none has an extensible architecture capable of harnessing the full potential of emerging AI technologies.