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The Kinform app on a phone next to the opened Bluetooth speaker board
The Kinform app on a phone next to the opened Bluetooth speaker boardCredit: @bonitadreama on X

Kinform: give a $13 Bluetooth speaker a voice, a personality and memories

Gadget, Easy

Kinform turns ordinary objects into AI characters. The first one, Greg, is a sarcastic rock living in a cheap Bluetooth speakerphone, voiced through GPT Live from an Android app.

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Dorothy Bartomeo tried kids' watches and an old camera before opening a $13 Bluetooth speaker that already had a mic and speaker for two-way calls. She fixed its stuck switch, connected it to GPT Live, and Greg was born: an ancient, sarcastic rock who is secretly affectionate. Her first audio bug turned out to be the speaker lying face-down on the desk.

Kinform is an Android app and a private backend built with Codex. Each character has its own memory. You can ask Greg to remember something, hear it read back, and confirm or cancel the save. Characters get preset or custom voices and can be exported and imported for backup. The phone stays in the background so the object feels like the interface.

This version needs no custom speaker firmware. Next she's looking at the RDA5856-based speaker board itself (its microSD slot, serial and debug pins, and onboard flash) to see if more of the character can live in the object. The post doesn't link any code.

Interfaces

Ideas to try with it

Our ideas, not the builder's claims.

  1. Give your robot vacuum a character and a voice the same way
  2. Make a plush toy that remembers what your kid told it yesterday
  3. Export a character and move it to a new object
Source
@bonitadreama on X
Posted
2026-10-17
Builder
@bonitadreama
Built with
Android, Bluetooth speaker

Links

Guides: Codex and ChatGPT hardware projects people actually built

What to build next

Builds that share a board, robot or agent with this one.