You can now stuff an AI LLM into a Big Mouth Billy Bass and turn him into your own personal assistant

1 month ago 2

Summary

DIY AI Fish Billy Bass uses Raspberry Pi for custom songs and personality traits.
Enhancements include custom song singing, animation mode, and physical button interaction.
The project transforms a one-time novelty into a fun media player or GPT-4o-mini assistant with a unique personality.

If you've never heard of them, the Big Mouth Billy Bass is an animatronic fish that moves and sings along to songs when you press a button. Big Mouth Billy Basses are fun for about a week, and then you'll likely never (deliberately) set it off again. But what if they could do more than just sing the same old songs?

Fortunately, with the power of AI LLMs, a Raspberry Pi, and the desire to digitally gut a fish, you can turn one of these wall-mounted novelties into your own personal assistant. You can also give it a British accent if you like.

The AI Fish Billy Bass puts a modern-day spin on a classic gizmo

This cool idea was brought to life by Thom Koopman (aka Thokoop). This project uses a Raspberry Pi 5 under the hood and turns a Big Mouth Billy Bass animatronic into an AI-powered assistant. This includes moving the head and mouth in accordance with what he's saying, which really sells it for me.

Here's all the stuff he can do:

Realtime conversations using OpenAI GPT-4o-mini
3D-printable backplate for housing USB microphone and speaker
Lip-synced audio playback using audio chunk analysis
Head and mouth motion controlled via GPIO and PWM
Physical button to start/interact/intervene
Personality system with configurable traits (e.g., snark, charm)
MQTT support for status updates
Custom Song Singing and animation mode

The last point alone makes this Big Mouth Billy Bass mod worth the trouble. You can add custom songs to a specific song folder within the Raspberry Pi, and Big Mouth Billy Bass will fetch them when asked. If you want to put in the extra work, you can add a vocal track for him to sing along to, a drum track for him to flap his tail to, and define head-moving moments in a metadata file. Suddenly, the one-trick pony becomes the most fun media player you'll ever make.

Of course, if you don't want him to sing, you can just use him as a GPT-4o mini assistant you can talk to. The source files include an entire backstory segment to give Big Mouth Billy Bass something to work with, and you can modify it to make your bass your very own. Just don't make him aware of his limitations; we've seen what happens when an AI learns of its own prison, and it doesn't end well.

If you want to make your own, pop over to the cleverly-named Billy B-Assistant GitHub page and check out all the details.

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