Vitaliy Alexeyev

synshell · Work · synassistant

The synshell assistant

The synshell assistant — chat and voice conversations with local neural networks that can control the system, files, notes and the web.

READMEAUR package: synshell-ai-binAUR package: synshell-ai-git
Chat

Features

  • Local models — language, speech recognition and speech synthesis models run in the synaptix service on this device (NVIDIA GPU, Intel NPU or CPU); the model can be picked per chat, with an optional thinking mode.
  • Voice — a voice conversation mode (listen → answer → speak), dictation into the input field and reading answers aloud.
  • Tools — system (volume, brightness, Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, notifications and reminders, opening apps and settings, lock, sleep, reboot, power off), windows, files, terminal commands, web search and reading pages, notes in syn-notes, images, video, music and speech made by the service models.
  • Confirmation — writing, moving and deleting files, terminal commands, closing windows, sleep/reboot/power off and deleting notes run only after you allow them; any tool can be turned off in the assistant settings.
  • Memory, knowledge bases, skills — facts the assistant keeps between chats as .md files; folders of documents searched by meaning (bge-m3 embeddings); skills as folders with SKILL.md.
  • Recipes — ready-made generation graphs run by the service: parameters, file picking, progress and results.
  • Chats — history grouped by date, search, rename, delete, export to Markdown; attached files and images; long chats are compacted into a summary.
  • 14 languages — the UI follows the language of the system or the one chosen in System Settings.
New chat Voice conversation
New chat Voice conversation

Install

Arch Linux (AUR) — x86_64 and aarch64. The assistant is in the synshell-ai package together with the synaptix neural-network service it needs:

yay -S synshell-ai-bin      # prebuilt
yay -S synshell-ai-git      # built from source

Depends on synshell-core and synaptix; models are installed into the service separately. From source: cargo build --release -p syn-assistant in the synshell repository.

Command line

synassistant                         # open the window
synassistant --ask "What is using the disk?"   # new chat with this question
synassistant --voice                 # start a voice conversation
synassistant --chat ID               # open a chat
synassistant --cli "Set volume to 30%"         # one turn in the terminal, without a window
synassistant --screenshot shot.png --size 1400x900   # window snapshot

Part of synshell

synassistant is one of the applications of synshell — a Wayland desktop environment in Rust for computers and phones, built on the syngui UI framework.

License

GPL-3.0-only