Mell
A desk robot that listens and speaks, sees and remembers. It has no face. It shows how it feels with light.
The idea.
No face. Light instead.
Mell is a small machine that lives on my desk. It listens and sees. It speaks and remembers.
It has no face. A clear box holds a field of light rods around a translucent core. Attention and emotion show up as colour and movement. The core brightens with its voice, so you can see it talk.
The name comes from Wavelength, a screenplay I'm developing. Mell is a character in it who communicates in colour.
Mell is also the first step towards a full-sized robot that can move. The head electronics and the software are designed to carry over.
How it works.
A Mac is the brain. The box is the body.
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Listening
A microphone array picks up speech from across the desk. Saying "Hey Mell" starts a conversation. Speech is transcribed on the Mac.
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Thinking
Claude handles the conversation. When a question needs it, Mell can search my personal knowledge graph.
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Speaking
Voices run locally on the Mac. Short in-character lines play straight away while a longer answer is prepared. You can interrupt it mid-sentence.
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Personalities
A physical key in a slot on top loads a personality. The first two are inspired by Orac from Blake's 7 and Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Each has its own voice, manner and colours. With no key, Mell stays quiet and speaks only in light.
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Noticing
A camera recognises faces. Radar senses when someone is nearby without the camera being on. Light gathers towards whoever is speaking.
Where it stands.
Voices first, then the brain, then the body.
The voices are working. A local speech service streams both personalities sentence by sentence. Each one has a bank of ready-made lines.
Next is the brain: a full conversation through the Mac's own microphone and speaker. Parts for the body get ordered once that works.
I'm keeping decision records as I go, so the design can be written up later.