Von Puppenstein

Von Puppenstein is a talking robot by Daniel Ritchie that layers a speech interface, realtime voice synthesis, and a character profiling system on top of LeRobot for conversational demos, public engagement, exploration of voice pipelines, and rapid prototyping and experimentation with HRI.

The project is built on a custom designed physical platform for transport and display at public presentations. Features encapsulated power management, DAC & microphone, speakers and amplification, cooling, and custom Raspberry Pi system with hardware-integrated services for mode switching and live voice cloning. A puppet was modified to be attached to and driven by a LeRobot SO-101 arm.

Software pipeline clones participant voices, evaluates scene with Google Gemini, generates text based on a selectable profile, and replays syntheitc voice using text-to-speech from Cartesia.

Check out this video on LinkedIn to see Von Puppenstein demonstrated during the March 2025 RMAIIG meetup on AI Voice.

This project was also showcased at RMAIIG Robotics — November 2025