Pi Zero plush toy that talks back using a fully local AI
A soft toy with a Pi Zero WH, camera and mic that chats, recognises faces and remembers people, with every model running on a local laptop.
Philosopher is a plush toy that listens, looks at you, turns its head and talks back, and none of it goes to the cloud. Inside is a Pi Zero WH with a USB mic, a camera, a speaker and a servo for the head.
The Pi does no machine learning. It streams sound and video over WebSocket to a laptop on the same network, which runs Whisper for speech, face and emotion recognition, Kokoro for the voice and a local Llama 3.1 8B for the replies. It keeps a memory for each person it recognises, and it can switch personality, from a stoic philosopher to a curious child.
You’ll need the Pi, the toy hardware and a laptop that can run an 8B model. The repo is split into a server and a toy folder and includes a hardware runbook. Code is on msalsas’s GitHub, with the original post on Reddit.
All credit to u/msalsas. The full story is at the original source.
