AI Talking Skeleton

 The haunted AI overlords have arrived!

My talking skeleton (Jawduino method) has been hooked up to a Raspberry Pi for a few years. This year, I have the Pi accessing a voice agent from Character.AI. The audio output from the Pi triggers the jawduino and allows a reasonable AI conversation.

Character.AI voice agents have great latency with minimal delay. This video uses an agent named “funny bones” who was trained on more creative material and is able to tell some good Halloween stories. A word of caution, however: the voice agents from character.AI are utterly pathologic liars. If something is not immediately in their training, they will just make up a response on the spot. The agents will go into standby mode if you don’t talk to them, but can be brought back with a click or two. Here’s a link to Funny Bones, if you’d like to try it out yourself.

https://character.ai/chat/-tC6vJKvAnHCELnPUa4cjIIeMNfSr7vsGQwsFmapI2k

I’ve also experimented with voice agents from Supernormal. Supernormal AI voice agents are more built for telemarketing, but I gave this particular voice agent “HauntedSkull” a set of instructions that makes him ready for trick or treaters. Supernormal AI voice agents are much more trustworthy (and I think tell better jokes), but a conversation can only last 10 minutes, and is a bit cumbersome to restart. Here’s a link to HauntedSkull if you’d like to try him out—

https://supernorm.al/j/eOwulp