OpenVoiceOS Receives NGI Zero Commons Fund Grant

We’re excited to share some fantastic news — OpenVoiceOS (OVOS) has been selected to receive a grant from the NGI Zero Commons Fund!

This milestone represents a huge step forward for our mission to build an open, community-driven, and privacy-first voice assistant platform. With this support, we can accelerate our progress from beta to a first stable version under our OpenVoiceOS umbrella.

What is OpenVoiceOS?

OVOS is Europe’s open-source alternative to proprietary voice assistants. Built around transparency, modularity, and user freedom, OVOS lets you choose every component of your assistant — from wake word and speech recognition to text-to-speech, intent handling, and AI conversation modules — all while keeping full control over your data.

You can run OVOS entirely offline, on-premises, or in the cloud, making it suitable for:

Smart homes and IoT devices
Accessibility and assistive technologies
Industrial and enterprise applications
Research and educational environments

What the Grant Enables

With support from the NGI Zero Commons Fund, we’ll be able to:

💼 Hire our lead developer to deliver on the first stable roadmap
🧭 Improve onboarding and usability for non-technical users
🌍 Expand language support and stabilize platform components
📚 Enhance documentation for developers building skills and plug-ins

Real-World Impact

OVOS is already making a difference across Europe and beyond. It powers projects such as the Royal Dutch Visio Voicelab, bringing voice interaction to visually impaired users, as well as conversational assistants in nursing homes, manufacturing, and/ or multilingual AI initiatives.

This grant helps us strengthen that ecosystem — empowering developers, researchers, and users to shape the future of open, ethical voice technology.

Thank You ❤️

We want to express our gratitude to the NGI Zero Commons Fund, NLnet Foundation, and our incredible community of contributors, volunteers, and users. Your support makes it possible to keep building a voice assistant platform that prioritizes freedom, transparency, and privacy.

Together, we’re proving that open voice technology can be trustworthy, user-owned, and truly free.

Stay tuned for more updates as we move toward our full first stable release!

🔗 NLnet Announcement 🔗 NGI Zero Commons Fund 🔗 OpenVoiceOS Project Page

Help Us Build Voice for Everyone

If you believe that voice assistants should be open, inclusive, and user-controlled, we invite you to support OVOS:

💸 Donate: Your contributions help us pay for infrastructure, development, and legal protections.
📣 Contribute Open Data: Speech models need diverse, high-quality data. If you can share voice samples, transcripts, or datasets under open licenses, let's collaborate.
🌍 Help Translate: OVOS is global by nature. Translators make our platform accessible to more communities every day.

We're not building this for profit. We're building it for people. And with your help, we can ensure open voice has a future—transparent, private, and community-owned.

👉 Support the project here