Turn Reachy Mini into a fully local baby companion

Baby Reachy-Mini Companion started as a project for the author's son. When the robot hears crying, it rocks gently, says calming words and sends a photo alert to the parent's phone. It also explains things at a child's level, tells classic stories like Goldilocks with expressive head and antenna motion, and warns you out loud if its camera spots scissors or a knife.

All 7 AI models run locally, with no cloud: Silero for voice activity, Faster-Whisper for speech recognition, Kokoro for the voice, YAMNet for cry detection, YOLO for faces and dangerous objects, and small language and vision models through Ollama. Cry and danger alerts are sent straight from code, so they don't depend on the language model picking the right tool. Signal alerts are optional. The app is in the Reachy Mini app store on Hugging Face, where it had 179 likes on Oct 17, 2026.

Hardware & cost: A Reachy Mini (Lite $399 or Wireless $499 at https://hf.co/reachy-mini) and a Mac. The README says a Mac alone is enough to start. An NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX ($700 per the README) is optional and cuts replies from about 6 seconds to about 3.

Difficulty: Medium. You install Ollama and pull a local model, and Signal alerts need signal-cli.

Safety: The author calls it a personal project and technology demo, not a certified childcare device. Always supervise children around the robot.

Agent install prompt (paste into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex): "Clone https://github.com/ravediamond/baby-reachy-mini-companion. Make sure the Reachy Mini SDK is installed, then follow the README: install Ollama and pull ministral-3:3b, run uv sync, copy .env.example to .env, and start the app on my Reachy Mini. Leave Signal alerts off unless I ask."

Source: ravediamond/baby-reachy-mini-companion on GitHub: https://github.com/ravediamond/baby-reachy-mini-companion (also on Hugging Face Spaces at https://huggingface.co/spaces/ravediamond/baby-reachy-mini-companion). Facts checked against the project README, Oct 2026.