Auralis

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  Auralis

Inspiration

Multimodal AI is powerful but expensive. We wanted to reduce token usage and cloud costs by making AI listen first and only use vision when visual understanding is actually needed.

What it does

Auralis is an Audio-Guided Vision Escalation Harness that runs speech recognition, VAD, and lightweight reasoning locally in the browser using WebAssembly. It only escalates to cloud vision models when local context determines visual analysis is required.

How we built it

We combined browser-based AI, Whisper-powered speech recognition, VAD, local reasoning, and a decision engine that selectively triggers GPU-accelerated vision models when necessary.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing accuracy and cost savings was our biggest challenge. We had to determine when local AI was confident enough to avoid expensive vision calls while maintaining a great user experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built an audio-first multimodal architecture. Reduced unnecessary vision processing and token consumption. Demonstrated local AI orchestration entirely within the browser. Created a practical, privacy-conscious approach to multimodal AI.

What we learned

We learned that smarter AI systems are not just about better models, but better decisions about when to use them. Intelligent routing can significantly reduce cost and latency.

What's next for Auralis

We're expanding Auralis with stronger on-device models, adaptive escalation policies, additional modalities, and enterprise-ready observability to make edge-first multimodal AI even more efficient.

Auralis: Listen First. See Only When Necessary. 🚀

Built With

• nemotron
• nextjs
• typescript
• whisper