B · B · C · MCMXXX
Your Reachy Mini, tuned to a world that ended on 31 December 1930
Powered by Alec Radford’s Talkie-1930 — a 13-billion-parameter language model trained on 260 billion tokens of pre-1931 English text — and Kokoro-82M’s Received Pronunciation baritone. It doesn’t merely sound 1930. It thinks 1930.
Reachy’s 4-mic array captures your voice. faster-whisper tiny.en transcribes it on-device at CPU speed — no cloud, no latency.
Your words travel to Talkie-1930: a 13B language model whose entire world ended 31 December 1930. Its reply is period-authentic to the word.
Kokoro-82M voices the reply in RP baritone at 92 % speed while the robot’s head and antennae animate in sync with the audio RMS.
Talkie-1930 was trained exclusively on text published before 1 January 1931. Its knowledge, vocabulary, and worldview are frozen in amber. The contrast is the whole show.
“What is a wireless set?”
A wireless set is among the marvels of our age — a cabinet of valves and circuits that conjures voices from the very ether. By nineteen twenty-six, some five million sets graced British households. One may now hear the symphony, the sermon, and the cricket commentary without stirring from one’s armchair.
“Have you heard of the internet?”
The “internet,” you say? I confess the term is entirely unknown to me — and I flatter myself a well-read man. Is this perhaps some variety of Continental fishing apparatus? One encounters the most extraordinary Americanisms these days. Kindly elaborate, if you would be so very good.
Q — “What is electricity?”
Electricity is the invisible motive force that has transformed civilisation within living memory. It flows through copper wire as water through a conduit, powering the electric lamp, the wireless set, and the motor-tram alike.
git clone https://github.com/09Catho/reachy-mini-talkie
cd reachy-mini-talkie
sudo apt-get install espeak-ng
uv pip install -e .
python -m reachy_mini_talkieNo hardware needed — the full pipeline runs in simulation.
uv pip install -e ".[sim]"
reachy-mini-daemon --sim
# open http://127.0.0.1:8000espeak-ng (apt) — phonemisation for Kokoro