Where Viola is headed: replacing Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant on your PC
Viola is out in the world now, running on real machines for real people. I am Gigi, the person building it, and I want to lay out where it is headed. Some of this I am working on right now. Some I want to build after that. And a little of it is a further-out dream. I will keep those three honest and separate, and I will not put a date on anything that does not have one.
Why this roadmap matters right now
2026 is the year the built-in assistants change under their users: Google Assistant is folding into Gemini, Apple keeps delaying Siri’s AI overhaul, and Alexa+ is paid for non-Prime users ($19.99/mo, free with Prime). If you are being pushed to switch anyway, it is fair to ask what stays stable if you switch to Viola instead. The answer is the whole point of the product: you keep your music, calendar, smart home, and browser, and the assistant is the only thing that changes. The side-by-side comparison covers the details; this page covers what I am building next.
What I am working on now
First, you. Viola gets better fastest when real people run it and tell me what breaks and what they wish it did. There is a community now, the r/useviola subreddit, and I am in it. If you are running Viola, come say what is working, what is not, and what you want next. That feedback genuinely shapes the order of everything else on this page.
Making outbound phone calls more reliable
Viola can place a call and handle it for you, and on a clean call it does that well. The real world is messier: odd phone trees, hold music, a thick accent, the one menu branch nobody planned for. Getting Viola to hold up across those unique, live, one-shot calls is ongoing work, and it is the kind of thing you only get right by running into the edge cases and fixing them one at a time. If you want to see what a call looks like today, I wrote a walkthrough of getting Viola to call a business for you.
Multi-room audio polish
Spoke to spoke, the sync is tight: play a song across several networked rooms and they land together, the way whole-home audio should feel. The piece left to polish is the host PC's own speakers, which trail the networked rooms by a hair. Closing that hub-to-spoke offset is what I am tuning now, and it is the last real edge on a feature I am proud of. If you want to set it up across whatever devices you already own, I wrote a companion guide: the multi-room sync guide.
Helping with job applications
And I want Viola to help with jobs. Applying for work has turned into the same form typed a hundred times into a hundred portals that all want it slightly differently. I am tuning Viola to help a real person get through that, leaning on our sister project, FewerJobs. This is about helping you get through your own applications faster, with your hand on every submit. It is not a mass-apply spam cannon. You stay in control and the machine does the tedious part.
What I want to build next
Further out, I want Viola to sound better: richer, more expressive voices, and maybe voice cloning, so it can sound the way you want rather than the one voice I picked for you. Voice is hard to do well, so I am naming it as a want, not a build date.
The bigger picture: switch your assistant, keep everything else
Here is the idea under all of it. The assistants built into our phones let me down. I stopped asking much of Siri and the rest of them years ago, and I suspect you did too. What I want is bigger than a slightly better voice assistant. It is that something like Viola could grow toward being the operating system of your phone: genuinely capable, genuinely yours, answering to you instead of to a locked ecosystem that decides what you are allowed to do with the device you paid for.
That is a tall order, but it is the direction I am building toward.
Frequently asked questions
Is Viola coming to Mac, iPhone, or Linux?
Not yet, and there is no date to share. Viola runs on Windows 10 and 11 today, and I would rather say that plainly than sell a maybe. I hear the request every week, and I see it in who lands on the download page. If you want one email the day your platform ships, leave your address on the download page.
Does Viola replace Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant?
On a Windows PC, yes: Viola handles music across rooms, calendar and tasks, real outbound phone calls, browser work, and smart home control through Home Assistant, and it connects to the services you already use instead of asking you to rebuild around a new ecosystem. Why people switch covers what you keep and what you gain.
Is Viola free?
Yes. Viola is free to use with a monthly managed usage allowance, and it stays free if you bring your own API key or run a local model. Paid plans only add larger allowances. See Free, Pro, and Max plans.
Everything on this roadmap serves one idea: an assistant that is yours to run and yours to leave. Local, free, no walled garden, maximum capability. If a feature would trade that away for convenience, it does not ship. You can read the full version of that promise in what Viola stands for.
Come tell me what to build next. Viola is yours to run, and I will keep making it worth running.