Project AIRI
A free, open-source virtual AI companion you host yourself — it can talk to you with a real voice, control an animated character, and even play video games like Minecraft alongside you.
🔗 Visit Project AIRI
Description
Commercial AI companion apps typically lock you into their cloud, their character, and their subscription. Project AIRI is a free, self-hosted alternative: you run it yourself, pick which AI model powers it (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, or a fully local model via Ollama), and it comes with a 2D/3D animated character (VRM and Live2D support with auto-blink and eye-tracking) that can talk to you with real-time voice and even actively play games like Minecraft, Factorio, or Kerbal Space Program.
It supports multi-provider text-to-speech (ElevenLabs, Microsoft Azure, OpenAI-compatible, or local Kokoro), client-side speech recognition and voice-activity detection, browser-based local inference via WebGPU, in-browser databases (DuckDB WASM, pglite), and chat integration with Discord and Telegram. Built with TypeScript, JavaScript, Rust, and Vue.js, it runs on web/browser, Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile (as a PWA), with optional GPU acceleration via NVIDIA CUDA or Apple Metal. It's explicitly inspired by Neuro-sama (the popular AI VTuber), MIT-licensed, actively maintained (devlogs through March 2026, 4,092+ commits), and has around 45.3k GitHub stars.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you've watched an AI VTuber like Neuro-sama and wanted something similar you actually control and host yourself, Project AIRI is a serious, actively-maintained attempt at exactly that, for free.
Compared to commercial AI companion apps (Character.AI, Replika), which are polished but keep your data and character on their servers under their rules, AIRI's self-hosted, provider-agnostic model gives you real control — pick your own LLM, your own TTS voice, even run fully offline with Ollama — at the cost of needing to set it up and maintain it yourself, which is a real barrier for non-technical users. The game-playing feature (Minecraft, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program) is genuinely unusual among AI companion projects and is worth trying specifically if that's the use case you want; the voice chat and VRM/Live2D avatar side is more competitive territory but still solid given it's free and open. As with any actively-developed open-source project inspired by a specific creator's work, expect some rough edges compared to a fully commercial, QA-tested product.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Open-source (licence MIT), auto-hébergé ; coûts éventuels des fournisseurs LLM/TTS choisis
Pros
Auto-hébergé, choix libre du LLM et du moteur vocal (y compris 100% local via Ollama)
Peut jouer à des jeux vidéo (Minecraft, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program)
Avatar VRM/Live2D animé avec voix temps réel
Gratuit, open-source, activement maintenu
Cons
Installation et maintenance à la charge de l'utilisateur
Moins accessible aux non-techniciens que Character.AI/Replika
Projet communautaire, moins de polish qu'un produit commercial testé en QA