In Search of a Private Digital Assistant

Over the last three or four months I have been on a bit of a quest. I have been looking for a private digital assistant. Not another chatbot or the latest frontier model, but something I could run on my own machine. Something that would genuinely support me whilst keeping my data under my control. It has been a busy time with work and other commitments, but I managed to carve out an hour here and fifteen minutes there to explore some of the more exciting developments in AI. I think I have finally found what I was looking for. It is not some amazing secret project. Far from it. However, getting to this point involved a surprising amount of experimentation, frustration, and the occasional dead end. In this series I intend to share the challenges, discoveries, successes, and inevitable setbacks that I have encountered, in the hope that my experiences and insights might help some of you avoid the same rabbit holes.