Companion robots · Anki
Anki Vector
Anki shut down in 2019, and Digital Dream Labs, who took Vector over, let its own servers fade after that. wire-pod, a free community server, is the reason a Vector bought years ago still answers to 'Hey Vector' today.
What it can become
What owners already do with it, easiest first.
Pick your own speech engine for 'Hey Vector'
wire-pod lets you wire in Whisper or another speech-to-text engine of your choice, running on your own server, instead of whatever cloud Anki used to pay for.
Control your own Vector from code
Anki's own SDK talks to Vector directly over your local Wi-Fi for custom behaviors and animations, a path Anki built for owners before the company closed. A maintained fork keeps it working against a robot running wire-pod; a separate community .NET SDK covers the same ground for non-Python code.
Bring a Vector back to life with your own server
wire-pod runs on a spare computer or a Raspberry Pi on your own network. Vector's own 'Escape Pod' feature, Digital Dream Labs' official way to point the robot at a server you choose, is what lets wire-pod take over with no soldering and no exploit.
Everything built for it
2 projects from the index, most active first.