Recent advances in large language models have improved their effectiveness as back-end components for voice assistants, particularly in intent understanding and context-aware input classification.
However, online-hosted models introduce network dependency and variable inference latency, limiting their suitability for time-critical autonomous driving applications.
In this work, we address these issues by developing Jarvis, an offline voice assistant for high-level behavioral commands of autonomous vehicles.
Its architecture integrates speech recognition and synthesis with natural language command classification into a lightweight, local framework.
Jarvis core component is a text-to-command classifier, built using a domain-specific fine-tuning of the Mistral 7B model, demonstrating low-latency inference.
Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our solution outperforms larger online-hosted models, achieving 97.63 % intent recognition accuracy with an average processing latency of 1.39 s, making it well-suited for operations requiring quick response times.
To support further research and fine-tuning, we provide an open-source implementation.