I made the robot buddy I always wanted. I’m having so much fun!
The project collects a lot of of ideas I’ve had knocking around, about personality design, voice UI, computer use workflows, etc.. It also uses OpenClaw for personality, skills, and multi-host networking; local models on my NVIDIA RTX 3090 for face detection, wake word detection, voice activity detection, and echo cancellation; and AI tool-calling for integration with emacs, SolveIt, tmux, macOS, and other workspace affordances. But here’s a little video for now. 🙂
Some more notes on Sparky and related technology:
- “My Robot Cares About Railway Stations” discusses his interests system.
- “A Latency Solution Disguised as Personality” discusses his wiggly antennas.
- “Lessons from OpenClaw” discusses the OpenClaw architecture, a note from before I started working on Sparky.
- “Sparky Is Not a Toy” explains the design choices which make Sparky useful, with an example working session writing.