There’s something about the ESP32 that makes people want to make really cute devices with it. Earlier this month, we saw someone build a little desk companion that demands pets, and now, someone else is showing off their latest project: a small, disk-shaped device you can speak to, which responds in kind with text and facial expressions. And it’s just so cute.
You, too, can install this cute open-source tamagotchi on your ESP32
He’s too adorable not to.
This ESP32 project is the Tamagotchi that talks back
And it has a cute face to boot
Over on the ESP32 subreddit, user MRBBLQ posts images and videos of their cute companion. It’s called Bopi, and it’s designed to clip onto your backpack and wait for you to talk to it, although it can get bored from time to time and decide to spawn in just to ask you something. The unit is also hooked up to an expression engine that picks the proper emotion for the reply.
Here’s how this cool little device works:
Bopi is built on top of LiveKit’s ESP32 SDK, which handles real-time audio streaming over WebRTC directly on the microcontroller. The Watcher connects to a LiveKit room, publishes its microphone audio, and subscribes to audio from the agent – all running on the ESP32-S3.
On the server side, a LiveKit Agent (agent/) listens to the room. It uses speech-to-text, an LLM, and text-to-speech to hold a conversation. The agent’s responses are streamed back to the Watcher as audio, and its transcription is sent as a data stream so the Watcher can react to individual words in real time.
For the facial expressions, the code keeps an eye on what Bopi is saying. When it identifies that Bopi says a word that matches one of its expressions, it plays the corresponding emotion. It’s a simple little system, but very effective at giving the little guy some personality.
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If you’d like to make your own Bopi (and why wouldn’t you?), you can check out all the required hardware and code over on the Bopi GitHub page. There’s also an offline version that puts itself into deep sleep after 30 minutes of no input and survives for a few days.
This adorable ESP32 desk “pet” will keep you company during work
Don’t let him down.
