English | 中文
News
🎥 Demo Video
Why OpenToys?
- Fully Local: NO cloud, NO subscriptions, NO data leaving your home, FREE AI forever.
- Multilingual: OpenToys supports multiple languages and accents: English 🇺🇸/🇬🇧, Chinese 🇨🇳, Spanish 🇪🇸, French 🇫🇷, Japanese 🇯🇵, Korean 🇰🇷, Portuguese 🇵🇹, German 🇩🇪, Italian 🇮🇹 and more!
- Voice Cloning: Clone your own voice or your favorite characters with <10s of audio.
- Customizable: Build your own toys, companions, robots and more with an ESP32.
- Open-source: The community is open-source and free to use and contribute to.
App Design
ESP32 DIY Hardware
Firmware Docs ⏭️
Download & Install
🚀 Quick Start (for development)
- Clone the repository with
git clone https://github.com/akdeb/open-toys.git
- Install Rust and Tauri with
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
- Install Node from here
- Run
cd app
- Run
npm install
- Run
npm run tauri dev
Cards & Stories
Create experiences with personalities that can play games, tell stories, engage in educational conversations. Here are some of the default characters with more prompt details in personalities.json.
Stack
- STT
- TTS
- LLMs (any model from
mlx-community works)
- Gemma 4 (26B A4B, 12B)
- Qwen3.8 27B
- Muse Glimmer 30B
- Qwen3.5 (2B, 4B, 9B)
- Qwen3 (0.6B, 1.7B, 4B)
- Ministral 3 3B
- gpt-oss 20B
- Llama 3.2 (1B, 3B)
- Realtime
- TODO: list realtime models
- App: Tauri, React, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, Rust
- Platform focus: Apple Silicon (M1/2/3/4/5)
- Hardware device: ESP32-S3
⚡️ Flash to ESP32
- Connect your ESP32-S3 to your Apple Silicon Mac with a USB cable.
- In OpenToys, go to
Settings → Connect your ESP32 Here, pick your serial port and click Flash.
- OpenToys flashes the bundled firmware images (
bootloader, partitions, firmware) directly.
- Unplug the toy once flashing finishes. You only need to do this again to update the firmware.
🎮 Play
The toy hosts its own WiFi network and your Mac joins it, so there is no router
setup, no captive portal, and no home network involved.
- Power on the toy. On boot it starts an open access point called
ELATO
(no password) at 192.168.4.1. Its LED glows pink while it waits.
- Join
ELATO from your Mac. It appears in the macOS WiFi menu like any other
network. macOS will warn that the network has no internet — that is expected,
the toy is not a router.
- Wait a moment for the handshake. The toy detects your Mac, finds the OpenToys
server on it, and opens a websocket. The LED turns white and the status row in
the app switches to
Ready on device.
- Press the green
Play button. It is disabled until the toy is connected
(it reads “Connect your Mac to ELATO first” on hover) and enables itself the
moment the handshake lands. Press it and the toy is live — start talking.
Leave OpenToys running while you play; it is doing the speech-to-text, the LLM, and
the text-to-speech on your Mac. To finish, press End in the app — it drops the session
and takes you to the transcript — or just power off the toy.
[!TIP]
While your Mac is joined to ELATO it has no internet access. Download your models
and voices before joining, or hop back onto your normal WiFi to fetch them and
then rejoin ELATO.
ELATO isn’t in the WiFi list — the toy isn’t powered, or the firmware didn’t
flash. Reflash and watch for the pink LED on boot.- Joined
ELATO but nothing happens — make sure OpenToys is actually running on
the Mac. The toy probes ports 49320 and 8000 on whichever machine joins it, and
waits for one of them to answer.
- The button says
Download voice — the selected character’s voice isn’t on disk
yet. Click it to fetch the voice, then come back.
🛡️ Safety Considerations
AI systems (local or cloud) are not perfect. This project is built with data privacy and safety in mind, but there are still important limitations:
- Hallucinations: LLM and TTS models can give incorrect or misleading answers. This should not be treated as a source of truth.
- Inappropriate outputs: Adversarial or ambiguous prompts can sometimes produce unsafe responses.
- Emotional impact: AI should not replace real human interaction, especially for children.
When using with children, use with parental awareness and treat this as a tool for exploration, not authority.
Tested on ✅
- M1 Pro 2021 Macbook Pro
- M3 2024 Macbook Air
- M4 Pro 2024 Macbook Pro
Project Structure
open-toys/
├── app/
├── arduino/
├── resources/
├────────── python-backend/
├────────── firmware/
└── README.md
Python 3.11 runtime binary, packages and HF models are downloaded on first app setup into the app data directory.
License
MIT
If you like this project, consider supporting us with a star ⭐️ on GitHub!
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