Been building Olaf, a companion robot, in the open for a while now and just closed out the phase focused entirely on making him expressive instead of just functional. Sharing the demo + what changed: Voice: swapped Cartesia for Google TTS — noticeably more expressive and natural. Head motion: tuned so movement tracks the words and tone of speech rather than firing randomly. Ears: redesigned the ear movement — surprisingly big impact on how readable his "mood" is. Heart: added a small display on the body that renders a beating heart. Multilingual: he can switch languages mid-conversation (in the demo he answers in Hindi). Still tuning the audio side. That's the expression engine done bar some fine-tuning. Next phase is the body — getting him mobile so he can move around the apartment. Everything's open source if you want to dig in. Would appreciate a star: Hardware: https://github.com/kamalkantsingh10/OLAF Voice agent / pipeline: https://github.com/kamalkantsingh10/olaf_companion Happy to answer anything about the build. Feedback very welcome — especially on the motion-to-speech syncing: right now I'm driving head/ear motion off the LLM output, and I'd love to hear how others have approached tying gesture to prosody. submitted by /u/KamalSingh10 [link] [Kommentare]
