Purple neon head silhouette in profile with cyan sound rings emanating from mouth

Your AI Assistant Can Talk

One of the neat features built into PAI is voice feedback. Your assistant can talk to you. It announces what phase it’s in, tells you when something finishes, and lets you know when it needs your attention. The way PAI ships this out of the box is through a built-in voice server that uses ElevenLabs for text-to-speech. It sounds great. But it’s designed for a setup where PAI is running locally on your Mac, and that’s not how I run mine. ...

February 18, 2026 · 7 min · Chris Cantey
Visual output system for a personal AI assistant

PAI Companion: A Visual Jumpstart for Your AI Assistant

If you’ve been following along with this series, you’ve got an AI assistant running in a VM. Maybe you’ve built the file drop tool and started exploring what it can do. At some point you’ve probably asked your assistant to build you a web page or a dashboard, and it worked, but then you had to figure out how to keep it running. Where does it serve the page? What port? And when you close the session, the server disappears and you’re setting it up again next time. ...

February 14, 2026 · 6 min · Chris Cantey
Files dropping into a container

File Drops for Your AI Assistant VM

Prefer video? Watch this on YouTube You followed the setup guide , you’ve got your AI assistant running in a VM, and now you’re wondering: how do I actually get files in there? ...

February 11, 2026 · 5 min · Chris Cantey
AI figure assembling inside a wireframe sandbox cube

Setting Up Your Personal AI Assistant

Prefer video? Watch this on YouTube You’ve probably used Claude or ChatGPT in a browser or app. You type a message, it responds, you ask it for something, it generates documents and content for you. But then you have to download it, copy and paste it, put it where it needs to go. That’s useful, but it’s limited by how quickly you can move data back and forth between what it’s building, the notes you’re feeding it, and the places you’re testing and checking its work. ...

February 2, 2026 · 16 min · Chris Cantey

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