Show HN: BillAI Bass, an AI-Powered Big Mouth Billy Bass Using Strands Agents

https://github.com/morganwilliscloud/billai-bass

by mtw14 • 9 days ago

71 28 9 days ago

mtw1412• 9 days ago

I built BillAI Bass just because I could. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi and Strands Agents with bidirectional streaming, and the repo includes the code and hardware setup. Happy to answer questions about the implementation!

JoshTriplett• 9 days ago

Fun project!

In lieu of the current lip-sync mechanism, do you have any plans to try giving the AI model more verbs to work with the motors (within safe thresholds), and then encouraging it to do more than just lip-sync? Lip-sync should clearly be the default for normal verbal responses, but you could also encourage responses like jaw-drop reactions, or patterns (would be funny to see it using its tail to tap out "shave and a haircut" as a bit).

mtw1412• 9 days ago

lol a jaw drop reaction could be awesome. Or like maybe extra tail flaps when it thinks it’s warranted.

dinkleberg• 9 days ago

This is great! I remember the commercials for these things as a kid. Imagine telling that kid that in the future Billy Bass will have the world's collective knowledge and you'll be able to talk to him about anything.

mtw1412• 9 days ago

Yess a nice dose of nostalgia. I want to download the original songs so he can still sing those too and just load them up as audio files it can play. I had it reading the news and giving me a summary but it just ultimately was too silly for that use case lol

dylan604• 9 days ago

was too silly for that use case lol

I don't know, some of the news today is so preposterous that it could only be delivered by a BillyBass.

selimthegrim• 9 days ago

They're going to have to rewrite that herring joke in Joys of Yiddish

trevoragilbert• 9 days ago

What a great name for a project

mtw1412• 9 days ago

relium• 9 days ago

Reminds me of Mike Neil's FishHack at the 2000 MacHack. https://tidbits.com/2000/07/03/the-machax-best-hack-contest-...

mtw1412• 9 days ago

That’s awesome! Billy bass has always been a fave for this sort of thing I found a couple of guides that were similar to mine when I was working on it too

zuckerborg0101• 9 days ago

I love that you put the Amazon Shopping list in the readme.md. Hacking this together is not intuitive

mtw1412• 9 days ago

Yes I agree! not intuitive at all. I tried to lay out everything I did so someone could easily recreate it.

swyx• 9 days ago

we need more people like you. kudos

reactordev2• 9 days ago

+10 points for giving it context that it's nailed to a plaque. -10 points for using Amazon Bedrock instead of a local conversational model that can run on the Pi without a subscription fee.

Replace the bedrock setup for a gemma-4 E2B one.

mtw1412• 9 days ago

You can actually run a local model with strands using Ollama pretty easily so you could just swap the model provider out in like 4 lines of code. So this would not be hard to do. Good idea!

ryandrake• 9 days ago

Yea, I like the idea of hooking this up to a local model running on my homelab and having no external calls. This project seems to provide a pretty good hackable foundation! I also wonder if it can be done with something smaller form-factor like a raspberry pi zero so it can be fully encased in the Bass plaque. This is a site to bookmark for later!

EDIT: Looks like modern versions of Billy have a motion sensor too--that could be fun to hack as well.

reactordev2• 9 days ago

My point entirely

fortran77• 9 days ago

Get a proper wire stripper! Don't strip wires with a diagonal cutter.

mtw1412• 9 days ago

Hahaha it was my first time!!! I am but a mere software person. You wouldn’t want to see my soldering joints… it wasn’t pretty but it got the job done

nerdsniper• 9 days ago

The trick for better quality low-skill soldering is:

1) Use a leaded solder with flux mixed in like the Multicore 502 [0]

2) Use more flux.

3) Use little alligator clips on adjustable arms to hold the stuff together for you so you can keep adding… yep… more flux.

4) Get some braided copper solder wick with flux in it for when you’ve finally added too much solder but it still looks terrible and you just wanna start over. After wicking away all the solder, clean up the wires with some more flux.

Oh also the flux is more toxic than the lead. Get some good ventilation so you can use more flux.

0: https://www.newark.com/multicore-loctite/c-502-99c-5c-0-7mm-...

tim-projects• 9 days ago

Does teeth qualify as a proper wire stripper?

Always worked for me

smusamashah• 9 days ago

If there is a small model that can run on a low powered device you might be able to use that too so that it is all self contained.

It will think (generate tokens) throughout the day, then convert that to voice and save it and will keep generating so on. Every time it is poked, it will play one of the saved recordings.

mtw1412• 9 days ago

Someone else suggested Gemma E2B which I can run on Ollama def going to try that next. I can also write a lil cronjob to have it wake up and do things on its own then wire up the button to kick off a function that starts the voice mode. I’ve found local models sometimes struggle with tool usage though. Fun direction to try next. Thanks!

Alfie_667• 4 days ago

how long did the hardware integration take ?

Show HN: BillAI Bass, an AI-Powered Big Mouth Billy Bass Using Strands Agents

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