Reachy Mini gets an open, swappable real-time voice engine

Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face introduced Hugging Voice, an Apache-licensed speech pipeline that chains voice detection, speech recognition, a language model and speech synthesis, with each part replaceable. It speaks the OpenAI Realtime API protocol and can run entirely on local hardware, keeping conversation audio at home. Pollen reported 9,000 Reachy Minis shipped with conversation features, logging about 15,000 hours of talk a month. It gives the open-source social robot community a fully inspectable alternative to closed voice assistants.

Source: Pollen Robotics