I build Minice, an independent software studio, with my friend Knice. Right now that mostly means Astra — a desktop voice assistant with a VRM character that lives in a transparent window on top of your desktop. It listens, answers, opens your apps, and changes expression depending on how the conversation is going.
It's written in Rust. Speech recognition and synthesis run locally. The avatar renderer is hand-rolled wgpu — MToon shading, GPU skeletal skinning, spring bones — because every off-the-shelf option wanted a game engine attached.
I started writing code in 2022 with a console Pac-Man in C#. From there: Unity, then WinUI 3 and Uno Platform, then Rust and shader math. Still moving — there's always something I haven't taken apart yet.
Most of our work is closed source, so this profile is the visible edge of it. The public repos below are pieces we pulled out of Astra and released on their own.
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Astra · closed source A desktop voice assistant with a character. Rust + Tauri, local STT/TTS, custom wgpu VRM renderer, agentic tool-calling pipeline. |
Minice · the studio Independent and self-funded. Everything we ship goes out under this name. |
| Repo | What it is |
|---|---|
| AstraPlugins | Plugin SDKs for Astra in Rust, Python and TypeScript, plus a CLI and example plugins. gRPC process isolation, so a plugin crash can't take the assistant down. |
| astra-search | Search layer extracted from Astra, usable standalone. |
| astra-hotkey | Cross-platform global hotkey capture for desktop apps. |
Core
Desktop & graphics
Voice & ML
Ships on
Reverse engineering, low-level internals, and two budgerigars who supervise.