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Show HN: Varkos – a local AI pet that can talk, interact, and play small games

1 pointsby 1h agovarkos.party
1 comments
1h agoHN ↗

Hey HN,

This is a follow up from a post of a few weeks ago about an AI gaming companion (an intelligent dog companion for Skyrim). I decided to double down on the local AI approach and package it as a self-contained creature, and try to broaden the types of hardware it can run on to.

I know it's a large ask to ask somebody to download a 9gb mystery executable, so I don't expect many to check it out. But in case you are curious.

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 skyrim 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

At this stage it's more of an experiment art project local inference and intelligent NPCs than a polished product (especially with the whole gimmick of summoning him by speaking out an invocation during the intro. It’s still early alpha, but the idea was to make something you can spend a little time with, then leave to his own devices while you go about your day.