Invented for the sequel to Star Trek in 1987, and also occasionally used in other sci-fi franchises such as Farscape, a Combadge is a low-touch device that uses speech recognition to address and communicate with other people and computer intelligences. There have been some commercial implementations of this concept, one of which is WiFi based and often found on eBay. Unfortunately, these devices are dependent on an expensive server platform which is inaccessible to home users and cosplayers, meaning that once they've been decommissioned from their original owners, these badges are e-waste.

The Combadge group aims to change that with Spindoctor, an open-source replacement for the OEM Voice Server that allows anyone to make use of these badges for their own projects - with an aim to require no more hardware than a mid-spec Raspberry Pi 4. The group also creates accessory software for this purpose, such as our voice agent, Robin and our native JS RTP library.

The long-term goal is to have a fully-fledged turnkey platform that allows people to use these badges in a home or community space, linking in with other technologies such as environmental controls (for example a home automation system), as well as networked AV and filtered information feeds.