Pia
Personal Information Assistant
Pia is a voice assistant. You can talk to her and give her reasonably
natural commands and she will try to understand them and execute them.
The commands are defined by voice apps.
Local
Pia works entirely on your computer and without Internet connection.
Speech recognition and voice generation happen on your device,
not in the cloud.
Pia encourages apps that keep all their data local.
Cheap 200 GB microSD cards mean that you can not only keep all your
contacts, personal calendar and emails, but a huge music library,
maps for the entire continent, and even a local copy of the Wikipedia,
so you can query the Wikipedia without calling the Internet.
All your data belongs to you
All your data stays on your device, and your device only.
This is keeps information about your personal life private.
Optional sync to other devices locally via Wifi and Bluetooth is planned.
Always on
It also means that Pia can work in places where Internet connection
is intermittent, for example in your car.
Obviously, Google searches, news, weather updates and so on will still
call out to the Internet.
Context
Pia keeps context of what you said and allows you to make
follow up questions, e.g. using pronous like "it" or
"Play songs by this artist".
Further reading