Fluent.ai is a virtual speech recognition engine that doesn’t send your commands to the internet, responds almost instantly, works in any language, and is so small you can embed it in even low-cost, low-power devices like a fitness watch.

Unlike Siri and Alexa, Fluent is a standalone assistant that understands you immediately and learns from you, getting better the more you use it. It doesn’t have the depth of typical virtual assistants, but that’s not the point. Instead, it’s faster, more accurate, and more private than efforts from Apple, Amazon, and Google.

“Speech to text uses natural language processing and then infers intent,” Fluent CEO Probal Lala told Lifewire during a Zoom interview. “It requires a lot of data and a lot of processing power. Fluent goes directly from speech to intent, taking your voice and turning it directly into an action.”

Fluent is a speech control software. It works by listening to your command and removing all the words it doesn’t need, leaving only essential nouns and verbs. “Turn out the lights,” simply becomes out and lights. It takes the essential elements out of a cluttered human sentence and converts them into steps. It’s almost like programming a computer, converting a complex idea into the simplest set of instructions.