Astibob is an open-source Go framework for building an AI that can understand you, speak back, and do much more. Published on GitHub under the MIT license with about 240 stars and updated in August 2026, it provides the plumbing for distributed voice assistants assembled from small abilities.
The architecture splits a voice AI into three parts. Humans operate the AI through a web UI. The UI talks to an Index, which keeps an updated list of all Workers and forwards messages between the UI and the Workers. Workers run one or more Abilities, simple tasks such as reading a microphone input, running speech-to-text analysis, or doing speech synthesis, and abilities can communicate directly with each other even when they live on different workers. Splitting abilities across machines is deliberate: a microphone in each room of a house can be its own worker. All communication uses JSON messages exchanged over HTTP or WebSocket, and official demo projects show complete assistants built with the framework.
Installation is a standard go get of the project’s packages, and a companion demos repository collects complete assistants built on the framework. Because workers register with the index and can join from different machines, an installation can grow one room or one ability at a time, adding a microphone here or a speech worker there, instead of being rebuilt whenever a new device appears.
Astibob is free and open source under the MIT license. There is no hosted version or paid plan; you build your assistant with the Go packages and run it yourself.
Astibob is for Go developers and home-automation enthusiasts who want to assemble a custom, multi-room voice assistant from distributed components instead of relying on a closed consumer device.