Show HN: Smart Mouth Billy Bass – another fishy LLM assistant (existens.org)

A developer has created an innovative project called Smart Mouth Billy Bass, transforming a classic animatronic fish toy into a quirky AI assistant. Inspired by a similar endeavor, this project aims to enhance user experience by implementing a local, dependency-free architecture that avoids latency associated with cloud-based models. Utilizing an ESP32-S3 microcontroller for in-toy operations, combined with a backend server for more intensive processing tasks, the initiative offers a functional—yet humorous—AI experience without the need for internet connectivity. Significant for the AI/ML community, this project showcases the feasibility of merging playful hardware and advanced AI without cloud reliance. By employing models like whisper.cpp for speech recognition and llama.cpp for generating conversational responses, the system maintains fast processing times, crucial for interactive use. Notably, the use of Kokoro TTS allows for rapid text-to-speech conversion, achieving low latency by employing a non-autoregressive method. This project not only highlights the versatility of AI technology but also encourages development towards localized and energy-efficient solutions in consumer electronics.