1 pointby pantelisk3 hours ago1 comment
  • pantelisk3 hours ago
    Hey HN,

    This is a fully local voice AI pet (ASR + LLM + TTS) that runs entirely on-device on consumer hardware.

    It uses:

    - Optimized qwen-3-asr which has been converted for voice streaming (will open source this).

    - Quantized gemma4 models with custom megakernel inferrence + speculative decoding as the brain (I have a finetuned version for specific scenarios but gemma empirically worked better as generalzed)

    - Pocket-tts with added vector embeddings for emotion, optimized for CPU inf (https://pantel.is/projects/pocket-tts-raven/?b=1).

    - Threejs for the rendering of the terrarium/jar and the 2 sample game demos that come with it

    The thing I wanted to test was whether an AI character could feel like something other than a chatbot.

    The dog sleeps, gets bored, asks for things. He wanders around, reacts when messed with, etc.

    Or let him "out of the jar" to play games with you. Instead of just talking to an LLM about a world, you can say things like “go over there,” "pick that up," “follow me,” or “check what’s behind that,” etc, and the character can actually act on it.

    The download is admittedly pretty chunky 9GB because all the models are bundled with it, but once completed it never contacts or sends any data outside again.