Developer revives 90s Big Mouth Billy Bass as a smart AI assistant with real-time lip-sync
The open-source 'BillAI Bass' project transforms the classic toy into a fully functional voice assistant capable of interactive conversation with realistic mouth and tail movements.
Developer Morgan Willis has unveiled an open-source project called 'BillAI Bass,' breathing new life into the iconic Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish. The project turns the wall-mounted toy into a real-time conversational AI assistant that not only speaks but also lip-syncs, turns its head, and wags its tail in sync with the audio for a lifelike experience.
At the core of the project is a Raspberry Pi 5 acting as the brain, powered by the Strands Agents framework. This bidirectional streaming agent facilitates live audio communication between the fish and the Amazon Nova 2 Sonic large language model, running on Amazon Bedrock. This technology ensures fluid, low-latency interactions, which is critical for the precise lip-syncing performance.
Inspired by previous projects like 'billy-b-assistant,' Willis rebuilt this version from the ground up using modern streaming technology. Since being posted on Hacker News, the project has gained significant traction, drawing praise for its lip-sync accuracy and sparking community ideas, such as having the fish wag its tail to the beat of music.
This project is a stellar example of applying AI agents and bidirectional streaming to physical hardware, proving that creating naturally interactive smart devices is well within reach for developers and makers.