I built my own AI butler. His name is Edison.

I run two businesses on my own. Some days that means too many browser tabs, a few AI chats, a calendar I forgot to check and a TV remote I can't find. So I built myself the thing I'd always wanted from the movies: an AI butler who sits at my desk, talks to me, and gets things done.

His name is Edison. This is what he is, what he does all day, and how I keep him safe.

What Edison is

Edison is a voice chief of staff that runs on my own Windows PC. I talk to him across the room. He answers out loud in a calm British voice. And behind that voice he runs my day:

He reads my calendar and inbox and tells me what matters.
He hands jobs to an AI team for each business and reads me their reports.
He watches my smart home and switches only the things I've allowed.
He keeps an eye on himself, and fixes what is safe to fix.

On screen he's a globe of about 1,500 little lights with a rainbow eye. The lights move when he talks, ripple when he listens, and blink now and then. His board around him is a set of panels and keys in purple, pink and cyan, the way a ship's computer looks in a sci-fi film.

A normal day with him

7:00 AM. "Morning. Two meetings, one approval waiting, three sales overnight." That's a real kind of briefing: he reads my calendar and inbox and keeps it short.

9:00 AM. "Have the GlowBop team check the launch list." Edison hands it to that business's AI team. The job opens as a chat in my Claude app, so I can watch it or step in. When they finish, a soft wind chime plays and he reads me the report.

11:00 AM. He starts a long answer and I say "just the price". He stops mid-sentence, hears what I actually said, and answers that. (I wrote a whole post on how talking over him works.)

2:00 PM. My shop team wants to spend $40 on an ad. An amber card appears with the cost and the proof. Nothing happens until I tap Approve.

6:00 PM. "Turn on the TV and open YouTube." Done.

9:00 PM. "Are you OK?" He checks his voice, memory and disk, and tells me in one sentence. If his voice engine got slow, he restarts it himself and says so.

How he hears, speaks and thinks

I wanted Edison to feel like a person in the room, not a website. So the voice parts run on my own computer.

Hearing: speech-to-text runs locally (Whisper today). I ran a hearing test of 30 sentences on two local models: NVIDIA's Parakeet was about six times faster than Whisper and got every brand name right, 17 of 17, against Whisper's 15. I'll switch once I've tested it with the TV on.
Speaking: his voice is a blend of two local voices (Kokoro's Lewis and Fable), with a short room and a little air added on top. No voice company sits in the middle.
Thinking: his brain is Claude, on my own Claude plan. When I switched how Edison talks to Claude, in a ten-question test the wait for his first spoken word averaged 7.8 seconds instead of 12.0, and the whole test cost $0.37 instead of $0.74. (One run each, so treat it as a first look, not a benchmark.)
Sound cues: instead of chattering "let me think about that", he plays four quiet sounds. A rising pair means he heard me. A shimmer means he's still thinking. A soft bloom means the answer is ready. A wind chime means the team is back.

He asks first

The scariest thing about giving an AI real access is that it might do something you didn't want. Edison has rules for that, built in from day one:

Spend, post, send or delete: every one waits on an approval card with the cost and the proof. If I talk over him while he's reading an approval back to me, it stays waiting. It is never approved by accident.
Stop everything: one key halts all his work at once.
Only my screens: commands only work from screens I've paired: the laptop, or my tablet after scanning a code.
Read-only by default: mail, calendar, files and the smart home are look-only until I say otherwise, one device or action at a time. Today he can switch exactly one thing in my house: the TV.

Why the movie comparison

Because it's the first thing people say when they see him. The movie butler set the bar for what a home AI should feel like: you talk, he answers, he quietly runs things. Edison is my version of that, built from real parts, for a real desk. He is his own character, though. He's polite, a little dry, and he'd rather tell you the short version.

What he can't do (yet)

Honesty matters more than hype, so:

He runs on Windows only, for now.
He needs your own Claude plan for his brain.
He's a personal build, getting better every week, not a finished product you can download today.

Talk to him

You can wake Edison up on the home page and say anything to him. That demo runs offline on a script, with made-up data, but it's his real voice and his real sounds.

If you'd like your own Edison, sign up to get him. You get him first, a place to share the voices, looks and team setups you make for yours, and a say in what he learns next.