Kisaki

The personal desktop companion for the elderly.

Kisaki is an Electron desktop companion focused on accessibility and ease of use. It combines a configurable dashboard, text-assist tools, and voice output into a lightweight cross-platform app.

• Desktop app built with Electron + Next.js (Nextron)
• Configurable companion personality (name, tone, verbosity, humor)
• Voice controls (enable/disable, voice selection, speed, pitch)
• Smart text tools overlay for:
  • Explain
  • Summarize
  • Translate
  • Fact-check
• Quick actions for test voice and app restart
• Multi-language UI support (English, Spanish, French, Chinese, plus runtime language handling)
• Persistent settings saved across restarts
• Linux-friendly runtime flags and TTS handling

Kisaki persists settings to a JSON file in Electron's per-OS user data directory.

• Implementation: main/helpers/settings.ts
• Runtime hookup: main/background.ts
• File name: settings.json

Typical locations:

• Linux: ~/.config/<AppName>/settings.json
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/<AppName>/settings.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\\<AppName>\\settings.json

On first launch, default settings are generated automatically.

• Overlay window is a frameless, always-on-top mini window.
• Clipboard polling detects selected/copied text and forwards it to overlay tools.
• If the overlay window is closed, it is recreated automatically on the next clipboard event.

To get started with Kisaki, please either build it locally or download a copy in the releases section.

• Electron
• Next.js (Pages Router)
• React + TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS + Radix UI
• Hugging Face Inference API (@huggingface/inference)

main/                 Electron main process + preload + window helpers
renderer/             Next.js UI (dashboard, overlay, i18n, components)
app/                  Built renderer output used in production packaging
resources/            Packaging resources (icons)
electron-builder.yml  Electron Builder configuration

Create a local env file for renderer values:

• renderer/.env

Used by text tools:

• NEXT_PUBLIC_HF_API_KEY

Example:

NEXT_PUBLIC_HF_API_KEY=""

You can generate an API key here!

$ npm i
$ npm run dev # development
$ npm run build # production build

• App packaging: electron-builder.yml
• TypeScript: tsconfig.json and renderer/tsconfig.json
• Next config: renderer/next.config.js

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to submit a pull request for features or translations.

MIT