ReadingBuddy

Your Reachy Mini reads books aloud with character voices

📸 Camera OCR 🎭 4 Voices 🧠 Page Memory 📖 Story Library

🎭 Character Voices

Tech Storyteller
GPU Dad mode
Superhero
Big energy
Princess
Sweet + bright
Robot Hero
Strong + brave
📸

Smart Camera

Capture pages, extract text instantly

🔊

Three-Tier TTS

ElevenLabs → Piper → espeak fallback

🧠

Page Memory

Remembers where you left off

📚

Story Library

Classic tales pre-loaded

🔊 Voice Quality Tiers

ReadingBuddy uses a smart three-tier voice system — great voices out of the box, upgradeable anytime!

🏆
Premium

ElevenLabs

Professional character voices with emotion and expression. Requires API key.

🥈
Default ✓

Piper TTS

Natural-sounding voices, runs locally on your robot. Completely free!

🥉
Fallback

espeak-ng

Robotic backup voice. Always available, no setup needed.

💡 Out of the box: You get Piper TTS — natural voices, completely free, no API key needed! Each character has a distinct voice personality.

🚀 Install on Reachy Mini

1
Open dashboard at http://REACHY_IP:8000
2
Click Install from Hugging Face
3
Search reachy_mini_bookreader
4
Click Install → Run → ⚙️

🥈 Setup Piper Voices (One-Time)

After installing, download the voice models once via SSH:

1
SSH into your Reachy Mini:
ssh pollen@YOUR_REACHY_IP
2
Create the voices folder:
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/piper-voices cd ~/.local/share/piper-voices
3
Download all 4 character voices:
wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/arctic/medium/en_US-arctic-medium.onnx wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/arctic/medium/en_US-arctic-medium.onnx.json wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/danny/low/en_US-danny-low.onnx wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/danny/low/en_US-danny-low.onnx.json wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/amy/medium/en_US-amy-medium.onnx wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/amy/medium/en_US-amy-medium.onnx.json wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/john/medium/en_US-john-medium.onnx wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/john/medium/en_US-john-medium.onnx.json
4
Restart the app and enjoy natural voices! 🎤

🏆 Enable Premium ElevenLabs Voices (Optional)

For the absolute best quality with theatrical character voices:

1
Get API key from elevenlabs.io
2
On your Reachy Mini, create a .env file:
cd ~/.local/share/reachy-mini/apps/reachy_mini_bookreader nano .env
3
Add these credentials (using our recommended voices):
ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=your_api_key_here ELEVEN_VOICE_TECH=9lv4qqEb8CqLgosI5Due ELEVEN_VOICE_SUPERHERO=248nvfaZe8BXhKntjmpp ELEVEN_VOICE_PRINCESS=mHX7OoPk2G45VMAuinIt ELEVEN_VOICE_ROBOTHERO=Q8ZbQAANLFvLw8uPBR8d
4
Save (Ctrl+X, Y, Enter) and restart the app
💡 Note: These are our curated voice IDs that work great for each character! You can also choose your own voices from the ElevenLabs Voice Library.