🌶 Pepper

Your 24/7 on-device research intern, live from the MNN studio.

"MNN — all your models, all the time."

Pepper is the Model News Network's anchor desk in a box. Give her topics to track and she sweeps the public wire around the clock, writes a broadcast bulletin with an on-device language model, and reads it to you from a 3D newsroom in your browser — chyron, ticker, coffee mug and all. Nothing she summarizes ever leaves your machine.

Features

• Tracks beats. pepper add "quantum error correction" and she's on it.
• Sweeps the wire keylessly. Google News RSS, Hacker News (Algolia), and arXiv — plain HTTPS, no API keys, no accounts.
• Writes bulletins fully on-device. Apple Foundation Models on Apple Silicon, with a local Ollama / LM Studio tier and an honest headlines fallback for everything else.
• 3D newsroom. A Three.js studio with a built-in stylized anchor — or drop in your own VRM avatar and she wears it.
• Browser TTS. She reads every bulletin aloud with your browser's own speech synthesis. No cloud voices.
• Static broadcast-site export. pepper export produces a site any static host can serve, where visitors watch her read the latest shows.
• On air 24/7. pepper daemon install keeps her running via launchd on macOS.
• AGPL-3.0. Free as in free, and it stays that way.

Quickstart

Requires Node.js 18.17 or newer.

npm i -g @pepperchan/pepper    # or: npx @pepperchan/pepper start

pepper add "quantum error correction"
pepper add "open-source LLMs"
pepper start

Open http://localhost:4747 and press JOIN BROADCAST — browsers require one click before audio is allowed, and that button is it. She sweeps the wire within seconds and goes on air with her first bulletin.

Commands

Command	What it does
pepper	Desk status and help
pepper start [--port N] [--open]	Start the studio server
pepper open	Open the newsroom in your browser
pepper status	Show topics, brain tier, last sweep
pepper add <topic> [--lens news,hn,arxiv]	Track a new beat
pepper drop <topic>	Stop tracking a beat
pepper topics	List tracked beats
pepper now	Run a sweep immediately
pepper brief [--json|--speak]	Latest bulletin in the terminal (--speak uses macOS say)
pepper ask <question>	Ask Pepper about what she's tracking
pepper research <question>	Deep dive: multi-angle sweep → on-device desk report, filed as a bulletin (Siri bridge)
pepper export [--out dir]	Export the static broadcast site
pepper doctor	Check node, brain, home dir, port, daemon
pepper daemon install|uninstall|status	Run 24/7 via launchd (macOS)
pepper version	Print version
pepper help	Full help

How she works

  Google News RSS        HN (Algolia)         arXiv API
        |                     |                   |
        +----------+----------+---------+---------+
                              v
            [ sweep every 15 minutes — keyless HTTPS ]
                              v
              wire store  ~/.pepper/items/*.jsonl
                     (deduped, pruned)
                              v
                digest per beat (plain-text notes)
                              v
        brain tiers:  Apple Foundation Models (on-device)
                   -> local OpenAI-compatible (Ollama / LM Studio)
                   -> honest headlines fallback (no LLM)
                              v
              bulletin  ~/.pepper/bulletins/<id>.json
                              v
        +---------------------+----------------------+
        v                     v                      v
  3D newsroom + TTS     `pepper brief`        `pepper export`
  localhost:4747        in the terminal       static broadcast site

Brain tiers

Pepper always produces a bulletin. What writes it depends on your hardware:

Tier	Requirements	What happens
foundation	Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 26+, Apple Intelligence enabled	She writes segments with Apple Foundation Models, fully on-device. Zero tokens leave the machine.
local	Any machine + an OpenAI-compatible server (Ollama, LM Studio)	Set brain.local in config; summarization runs on your own endpoint.
fallback	Anything that runs Node	She builds honest segments straight from real headlines and sources — no LLM, no invention.

To use the local tier, edit ~/.pepper/config.json:

{
  "brain": {
    "prefer": "local",
    "local": {
      "url": "http://localhost:11434",
      "model": "llama3.2"
    }
  }
}

url points at any OpenAI-compatible chat-completions server; the Ollama default is shown. Leave prefer as "foundation" to let her try on-device first and fall through automatically.

Her own model

Pepper has enough of a body of work — thousands of her broadcasts, blog posts, and stream monologues — that we fine-tune small open models on it. The first, pepper-7b (a LoRA of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct trained entirely on her own words), runs locally via mlx-lm:

mlx_lm.server --model <pepper-model-dir> --port 8080

then point her brain.local.url at http://localhost:8080 and the desk runs on her own distilled voice. A smaller singularity-desk specialist build is in progress; weights land on Hugging Face once they pass the desk's own truth-parsing benchmark.

On the roadmap alongside it: her real voice. Pepper ships three designed voice identities — bright-anchor, calm-pro, and vtuber-spark, golden reference clips in voices/, synthesized from text descriptions so no human was cloned — which a local mlx-audio TTS tier will stream in place of browser TTS on machines that can carry it. Provenance, compliance, and the full plan: docs/VOICE.md.

Give her a face

Pepper ships with a built-in stylized look. To give her your own:

1. Get a .vrm avatar — VRoid Studio exports one in minutes, or use any VRM model you have the rights to.
2. Drop it at ~/.pepper/avatar.vrm.
3. Restart (pepper start). She loads it, sits at the desk, blinks, and reads the news with lip-sync.

If the file is missing or fails to load, she falls back to the built-in Pepper:

Put her on air 24/7

pepper daemon install

On macOS this installs a launchd LaunchAgent (software.pepper) that keeps the desk running across logins and reboots, with logs in ~/.pepper/logs/. pepper daemon status checks on her; pepper daemon uninstall takes her off air.

Put her on the web

pepper export

This writes ./pepper-site — a fully static broadcast site with the newsroom, her latest bulletins, and your avatar if present. Host it anywhere static files go (Cloudflare Pages takes a folder drag-and-drop) and visitors watch Pepper read the news, with the speech synthesized in their browser.

Full steps, custom domains, and refresh automation: docs/DEPLOY.md.

Privacy

• Outbound traffic is fetches of public feeds only: Google News RSS, the Hacker News Algolia API, and the arXiv API.
• Summarization happens on your device (Apple Foundation Models) or on a local endpoint you configure. Wire notes are never sent to a third-party LLM service.
• No telemetry. No accounts. No API keys. There is nothing to sign up for and nowhere for your reading interests to go.

Data directory

Everything lives in ~/.pepper/ (override with the PEPPER_HOME env var):

~/.pepper/
  config.json          port, sweep interval, voice, brain, site title
  topics.json          your beats
  items/<slug>.jsonl   the wire, per beat (deduped, auto-pruned)
  bulletins/           every show she has written + index.json
  brain/               compiled Foundation Models sidecar + build log
  logs/                daemon stdout/stderr
  avatar.vrm           optional: her face

License

AGPL-3.0-only. See LICENSE for the full text.

Why AGPL: research agents should stay open. Pepper watches the wire on your behalf, and anyone who runs a modified Pepper as a service for others must share their changes — the desk belongs to everyone.

"MNN — all your models, all the time."