"Most DIY AI gadgets are bare boards and wires, or at best a 3D-printed box, and that clashes with the idea of leaving them on a shelf or side table. Even clever builds end up looking like projects rather than finished objects. D. Creative's tiny AI robot is a counterexample, a chatbot built inside a toy astronaut that looks like decor first and a smart assistant second, making it actually display-worthy."
"The internals pack tightly. An ESP32-S3 Super Mini acts as the brain, a digital I²S microphone hears you, a matching I²S amplifier and tiny speaker reply, and a 300 mAh battery with a charging board keeps it running. The 0.96-inch OLED is tucked into the helmet as the robot's face, giving the AI a place to look back from when you address it or ask for help."
"The interaction loop is straightforward. You speak, the mic captures your voice, the ESP32 sends it over Wi-Fi to a speech-to-text service and then to the Qwen3 LLM, the response comes back as text, and a text-to-speech engine turns it into audio for the speaker. The astronaut's OLED changes expression to show when it is listening, thinking, or ready to answer, turning a text exchange into something more animated."
A toy astronaut figurine conceals a complete voice-enabled chatbot built around an ESP32-S3 Super Mini, a digital I²S microphone, I²S amplifier, tiny speaker, 300 mAh battery, and a 0.96-inch OLED. The builder gutted a light-up astronaut toy, drilled holes for buttons and a USB port, installed the electronics, and resealed the shell to preserve the original proportions and charm. Voice input is sent over Wi‑Fi to a speech-to-text service and the Qwen3 LLM; the text response is converted to speech for playback. The OLED displays listening, thinking, or ready expressions to animate interactions.
Read at Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News
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