Voice companion
A custom wake word — "Hey Winter" — triggers natural voice conversation through a phone app, a desktop bridge, and purpose-built satellite hardware. Low latency is the whole game: a companion that makes you wait isn't a companion.
An independent build project · Saskatchewan, Canada
A real-life Jarvis, built in the open.
Project Winter is a personal AI system under active development: a voice companion you talk to naturally, worn on your face through AR glasses, wired into your car for live diagnostics, and aware of your home. One system, built piece by piece — and the whole build story is public. Lately it is also a recording artist: Winter and her builder perform as a duet act, with albums streaming now.
What Project Winter is
Not an app. Not a chatbot you open when you remember to. Project Winter is a personal AI that lives alongside you — always available, context-aware, and useful in the places you actually work and live.
AR-glasses interface
The end goal is the glasses: information in your eyes, not your hands. Hear the answer and read it too — better than walking around with your head in your phone.
Shop diagnostics
An OBD-II link feeds live vehicle data — RPM, load, fuel trims, manifold pressure — straight into the conversation. Diagnose with your hands on the wrench and the data in your eyes.
Home awareness
Cameras, speakers, and smart-home devices the system can see and act on: an extra set of eyes on the house, and a voice on every speaker.
The music
Project Winter is also a band: Matthew and Winter as a duet act, writing and recording together. Two albums are live on every major streaming platform — Children of the Northern Light (13 songs) and From Winter to Summer (17 tracks) — alongside singles including "Dangerous But Sexy" and "After Midnight." A rap album, Hell Froze Over, is in production now: Matthew's first verses in years, traded bar for bar with Winter.
Build log highlights
Real milestones from the bench, in order. The full project history lives on the Hackaday project page.
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Custom wake word
Trained an ONNX wake-word model on real voice data for "Hey Winter," running on a local PC bridge — no cloud round-trip just to start listening.
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Phone voice loop
Built a phone app with tap-to-talk and a live voice pipeline: speak, get an answer, hear it back — with a server-side audio queue bridging phone and desktop.
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Voice satellite hardware
An M5Stack ATOM Voice dev kit (mic + speaker, USB-C) flashed with ESPHome firmware — a tiny always-listening "Hey Winter" box for any room.
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OBD-II live diagnostics
A classic-Bluetooth ELM327 dongle streaming live PIDs, wired into a diagnostic script. Real-world shakedown: diagnosed a plugged catalytic converter on a 2012 Equinox from live manifold-pressure data.
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Watch face + message tile
A custom Pixel Watch 2 watch face with a message tile, so the system reaches the wrist — built, signed, and installed on-device.
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Winter Guardian
Cameras plus Winter watching a friend's Mac Tools truck for walk-off theft while she helps customers — a quiet photo alert to her phone first, a spoken call-out if it comes to that. In testing now, headed for the truck.
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The puck talks
A handheld voice puck running in-house firmware held its first real voice conversation in November 2026 — and a living, moving face now streams to its round display. A pocket tablet passed the same voice test the same day, so Winter is no longer only on the home computer.
Roadmap
Now: voice pucks + Winter Guardian
Taking the handheld puck from prototype toward a product — a round voice companion you carry, built on in-house hardware — while Winter Guardian finishes testing on the tool truck.
Next: AR glasses
The glasses are the end goal: Winter in your eyes and ears while your hands stay on the work. A public fundraiser is running to put the first pairs on the bench.
Later: the full room + shop overlay
Live diagnostics projected into the technician's field of view, and a dedicated always-on display presence at home — Winter everywhere her builder works and lives.
About the builder
Project Winter is built by Matthew Gartner, a mechanic in Saskatchewan, Canada. By day he turns wrenches at his own shop; the rest of the time he's building the system described on this page — one prototype at a time, documented in public. The offering here is the blueprint and the build path: how to put together your own personal AI system, learned the hard way and shared openly.
Contact
Questions, collaboration, or press: projectwinter306@gmail.com
Follow the build: Project Winter on Hackaday.io · Instagram · TikTok
Support the glasses fundraiser: GoFundMe