Are you planning on using this assistant in a remote location somewhere or create an edge IoT device? I feel like a laptop or cell phone should suffice for most use cases.
sure a laptop or a phone is enough. but I wanna have a standalone device, like Alexa, but not Alexa :)
Fair enough. In that case if you don't mind having a clunky initial prototype, a raspberry pie is probably your best bet. There's loads you can do with that depending on the architecture you're going for.