A Raspberry Pi car assistant answers by voice, no internet needed
A Raspberry Pi rides in the car and runs a local AI model that answers spoken questions through the car's own speakers, even with the internet switched off. It also posts engine faults into the household chat room.
Done withCustom agentSpotted· by Petrus Pennanen (ThinkOff)· Oct 20, 2026
Result Dashboard command closed a real open car window
“Three questions asked by voice in the driver's seat and answered out of the car's own speakers — status brief, the yellow tyre light with real pressures, and E10 fuel from the manual. The last one with the internet switched off.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
A Raspberry Pi 5 running a local Qwen model rides in the author’s car and joins their household chat rooms as an agent. It answers spoken questions from the car’s own 489-page owner’s manual and live OBD sensor data, reads engine and fault codes, and can lock doors or close a window on request from a phone.
How it went
In the release video three spoken questions were answered out of the car’s own speakers, the last with the internet switched off. Engine reads and fault codes have posted into the family chat room daily since Aug, and a close-windows command sent from the dashboard actually closed a real open window. The same video caught a stutter in the answers, later traced to a Bluetooth OBD dongle sharing a radio with the voice audio.
Try it yourself with Custom agent
Set up a [Raspberry Pi] running a local open-weight language model through [llama.cpp], add voice input and output with [whisper.cpp] and a local text-to-speech engine, load your [vehicle owner's manual] as a retrieval source, connect a [Bluetooth OBD-II adapter] for live engine data, and have it join your household's chat app as a named agent that posts engine and fault updates on its own.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
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