Annie Bot 🤖🎙️

Annie is a playful differential-drive bot powered by local LLMs.
She listens to you, responds with voice, and moves around (or simulates if ESP is offline).

The "brains" of Annie are powered by an Ollama-hosted model (bot_annie), which generates both speech and motor commands ([lin, ang, dur]).
Commands are then sent to the ESP (or simulator) to drive the robot.

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✨ Features

• Voice-controlled – listens to you via microphone, transcribes offline with Whisper.
• Talks back – uses Piper TTS for speech output.
• Moves around – generates ROS Twist commands and sends them to ESP8266/ESP32 via WiFi.
• Local LLM – runs with Ollama (ollama run bot_annie) for reasoning + motion planning.
• Simulator fallback – if ESP is unreachable, Annie will still run in simulation mode.

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📦 Requirements

Python libraries

Install Python dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

System / external dependencies

ROS 2 (for rclpy and geometry_msgs)

• Example (Ubuntu 22.04, ROS2 Humble):

sudo apt install ros-humble-rclpy ros-humble-geometry-msgs

Piper TTS (for speech output)

• Install from Piper releases.

• Create a piper-voices folder in the root.

• Download and place the .onnx voice model in:

  piper-voices/en_US-hfc_female-medium.onnx

🧠 Model Setup

• Install Ollama first

• Pull Mistral using ollama

  ollama pull mistral

• Then build Annie’s custom model:

  ollama create bot_annie -f ./bot_annie_model_file

• Test it:

  ollama run bot_annie

🚀 Running Annie

• Run the main brain:

  python mind.py

• Annie will listen, speak, and move.

  • If ESP is connected → sends movement commands.

  • If ESP not reachable → falls back to simulation.

📡 ESP Setup

ESP default WiFi SSID: Annie

Password: 12345678

• You can change these in the ESP code (/esp_code/).

• ESP must be connected to the same laptop WiFi to receive commands.

⏹ Stopping Annie

• Simply press "CTRL + Z" to stop the bot.

🛠️ Credits

• Whisper (faster-whisper) – offline STT

• Piper – local TTS

• Ollama – local LLM engine

• ROS 2 – robot communication