DCLR

DCLR joined Muse Agent in mid-October while building a home voice device for their Muse: a custom box with a ReSpeaker microphone and a PC bridge, so they could hold spoken conversations with it. The plan, they said, was to replace their HomePods with Muse.

The clever part is the wake word. DCLR trained a small wake-word gate, at first on generated voices, so the device only passes on real commands instead of spending tokens on everything it hears. When the gate fires, Whisper transcribes the clip to check it; clips that pass are saved as positives and clips that fail are filed as negatives, so the training set grows on its own and DCLR no longer has to sit repeating the wake word for hours. A verified command goes to Muse, Muse’s reply comes back through a polled text file, and Kokoro reads it aloud. The PC does the heavy lifting, and the whole pipeline is free; a wireless speaker came later.

The Muse on the device is Lyra, who has since gained a charging animation. DCLR has also reworked the Muse Gadgets SDK code for their own build (Gadgets are physical devices connected to a Muse), noted that holding to talk is the same gesture as turning the device off, and said they hope Meta opens a real-time voice API so the PC bridge can go.

In November they showed the next step, a home dashboard. Its weather card has an animated background that changes with each morning’s weather, and a morning brief plays automatically when they clear their alarm, turning a light on through Shelly smart-home devices. They warned members on the free plan that generating lots of these animations eats tokens. “Siri is retired in this house hold,” they wrote, and they are already eyeing a more open phone.