Pipi

Pipi is a smartphone robot that can talk, remember things, take photos, and drive around when mounted on an Octobot.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac with at least 32 GB unified memory.
• The default local model set needs about 8-10 GB of unified memory at runtime.
• Node.js 22+, Rust, Xcode command line tools, Xcode Metal Toolchain, CMake, pkg-config, Opus, and tar.

Install native build prerequisites:

brew install cmake pkg-config opus
xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain

Setup

npm install --ignore-scripts
npm run submodules
npm run build:native
npm run dev

Open:

http://localhost:8010

For phone access, expose port 8010 over HTTPS, for example with ngrok.

Models

Pipi runs local LLM, STT, and TTS models. Missing default models are downloaded automatically on startup.

• LLM: Gemma 4 26B A4B MoE Q4 via llama.cpp.

  • Model: ggml-org/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF
  • Downloaded into: ~/models/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it
  • Pipi also downloads a pinned llama.cpp release into ~/.cache/pibot/llama.cpp.

• STT: Parakeet TDT 0.6B int8 ONNX with Silero VAD.

  • Model: istupakov/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-onnx
  • Downloaded into: ~/models/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-onnx-int8

• TTS: Qwen3-TTS 0.6B Base 6-bit MLX.

  • Model: mlx-community/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-Base-6bit
  • Downloaded into: ~/models/qwen3-tts-12hz-0.6b-base-6bit

Commands

npm run dev             # start the development server
npm run build:native    # build STT and TTS native workers
npm run build:stt-rust  # build only the Rust STT worker
npm run build:tts-rust  # build only the Rust Qwen3-TTS worker
npm run check           # format/lint/typecheck/build client
npm run bench:stt       # benchmark STT worker
npm run bench:tts       # benchmark TTS worker
npm run bench:llm       # benchmark local LLM server