Leon

Your open-source personal assistant.

Website :: Documentation :: Roadmap :: Contributing :: Story

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Important Notice (as of 2026-01-11)

[!IMPORTANT]
Leon is currently undergoing a massive architectural rewrite.

The develop branch is highly experimental and may be unstable as I implement the new agentic core.

• If you are looking for the legacy, stable version (pre-LLM), please use the master branch.
• If you want to contribute to the future of Leon (LLMs, Agents, Automation), you are in the right place.

Outdated Documentation

Please note that the current documentation and this README are outdated regarding the technical architecture. We are moving away from simple classification toward a hybrid approach involving Local LLMs, Transformers, and Atomic Tools. Updated documentation will be released alongside the new core stability.

Project Evolution and Future Plans

I have been working on Leon since 2017. While development has been inconsistent in the past, the current era of AI unlocks capabilities that were previously impossible. I'm now transitioning Leon from a standard assistant to a fully autonomous personal AI assistant designed to be used by technical hobbyists to non-tech users.

I'm currently building the foundation for the next generation of Leon, focusing on 3 key milestones:

1. Workflow Architecture and Atomic Tools

We are restructuring Leon around a robust flow: Skills > Actions > Tools > Functions (> Binaries).
Instead of monolithic scripts, Leon will use atomic components (e.g. compiled binaries using ONNX runtime) to execute complex workflows.

• Example: a "Video Translator" skill won't just be a script; it will be a workflow where Leon orchestrates tools like vocal isolation, zero-shot voice cloning, ASR, audio gender recognition, etc. to achieve the result.

2. Autonomous Skill Generation (self-coding)

We are developing a meta-skill capable of writing code for new skills automatically.

• Leon will analyze a request, check if a skill exists, and if not, write the code itself following our strict architectural standards.
• It will leverage existing tools and inject the new skill directly into its memory for future reuse.

3. Agentic Behavior (ReAct) and Local LLM Optimization

The ultimate phase will be to adopt the ReAct (Reason + Act) approach.

• Leon will be provided with low-level tools (organized in toolkits, e.g., music_audio containing FFmpeg).
• Using Local LLMs, Leon will loop through thoughts and actions to solve problems dynamically.
• Optimization: we are implementing strict context filtering to save tokens, reduce hallucinations, and ensure high performance on local hardware.

Get Involved

Join us on Discord to ask questions, or express interest in becoming an active contributor.

• Check out the roadmap for more information on our upcoming plans.
• Watch a preview of our last progress to see what we've been working on.

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Why is there a small amount of contributors?

I'm taking a lot of time to work on the new core of Leon due to personal reasons. I can only work on it during my spare time. Hence, I'm blocking any contribution as the whole core of Leon is coming with many breaking changes. Many of you are willing to contribute in Leon (create new skills, help to improve the core, translations and so on...), a big thanks to every one of you!

While I would love to devote more time to Leon, I'm currently unable to do so because I have bills to pay. I have some ideas about how to monetize Leon in the future (Leon's core will always remain open source), but before to get there there is still a long way to go.

Until then, any financial support by sponsoring Leon is much appreciated 🙂

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Latest Release

Check out the latest release blog post.

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👋 Introduction

Leon is an open-source personal assistant who can live on your server.

He does stuff when you ask him to.

You can talk to him and he can talk to you.
You can also text him and he can also text you.
If you want to, Leon can communicate with you by being offline to protect your privacy.

Why?

1. If you are a developer (or not), you may want to build many things that could help in your daily life.
   Instead of building a dedicated project for each of those ideas, Leon can help you with his
   Skills structure.
2. With this generic structure, everyone can create their own skills and share them with others.
   Therefore there is only one core (to rule them all).
3. Leon uses AI concepts, which is cool.
4. Privacy matters, you can configure Leon to talk with him offline. You can already text with him without any third party services.
5. Open source is great.

What is this repository for?

This repository contains the following nodes of Leon:

• The server
• Skills
• The web app
• The hotword node
• The TCP server (for inter-process communication between Leon and third-party nodes such as spaCy)
• The Python bridge (the connector between the core and skills made with Python)

What is Leon able to do?

Today, the most interesting part is about his core and the way he can scale up. He is pretty young but can easily scale to have new features (skills).
You can find what he is able to do by browsing the skills list.

Please do know that after the official release, we will build many skills along with the community. Feel free to join us on Discord to be part of the journey.

Sounds good to you? Then let's get started!

☁️ Try with a Single-Click

Gitpod will automatically set up an environment and run an instance for you.

🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js >= 22.13.1
• npm >= 10.9.2
• Supported OSes: Linux, macOS and Windows

To install these prerequisites, you can follow the How To section of the documentation.

Installation

# Install the Leon CLI
npm install --global @leon-ai/cli

Install Leon (stable branch)
leon create birth
OR install from the develop branch: leon create birth --develop

Usage

# Check the setup went well
leon check

Run
leon start
Go to http://localhost:1337
Hooray! Leon is running

📚 Documentation

For full documentation, visit docs.getleon.ai.

🇫🇷 Documenting the Journey on YouTube

I'm documenting the journey on YouTube in developing our dear Leon. I also take you along in my daily life here in China.

For non-French speakers, translated English subtitles are available.

📺 Video

Watch a demo.

🧭 Roadmap

To know what is going on, follow roadmap.getleon.ai.

❤️ Contributing

If you have an idea for improving Leon, do not hesitate.

Leon needs open source to live, the more skills he has, the more skillful he becomes.

📖 The Story Behind Leon

You'll find a write-up on this blog post.

🔔 Stay Tuned

• Twitter
• Newsletter
• Blog
• GitHub issues
• YouTube
• #LeonAI

👨 Author

Louis Grenard (@grenlouis)

👍 Sponsors

Appwrite 250 USD / month

Anonymous 100 USD / month

herbundkraut 10 USD / month

You?

You can also contribute by sponsoring Leon.

Please note that I dedicate most of my free time to Leon.

By sponsoring the project you make the project sustainable and faster to develop features.

The focus is not only limited to the activity you see on GitHub but also a lot of thinking about the direction of the project. Which is naturally related to the overall design, architecture, vision, learning process and so on...

Special Thanks

           

📝 License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2019-present, Louis Grenard [email protected]

Cheers!