Inspiration
WHAT BUDDY IS Buddy is a pixel-art cat companion that keeps you company on your screen while you work or study. You choose Mochi, a bubbly cat girl, or Kiko, a laid-back, quietly encouraging cat boy. Buddy notices what you're doing and reacts with recorded voice lines. It cheers you on while you're in the zone and checks on you when you drift away.
THE PROBLEM Working alone at a computer is lonely, and most productivity tools just nag. Buddy notices what you're doing and responds to it.
WHAT IT DOES
- Floats over any website through a browser extension (Chrome, Edge, Firefox). You can pet it, feed it fish and chat with it. Click it too fast and it gets annoyed.
- Reacts to what you do: copy, paste and undo each get their own voice line, and long typing streaks earn a "Look at you go!"
- Optional webcam presence using on-device pose tracking. It says "Welcome back!" when you return, encourages a stretch when you get up, waves back when you raise a hand, notices when you lean in to focus, and asks "Where did you go...?" if you've been gone a while.
- Has its own needs and moods: hunger, energy, attention, affection and boredom. A behavior "brain" decides what it does next: napping, studying with you, watching your screen, asking for attention, even playing dead. A distraction budget limits how often it interrupts you.
- Chats in character using Claude, and falls back to built-in replies offline.
- Speaks with 55 recorded voice clips across the two characters.
PRIVACY BY DESIGN Everything runs on your own machine. The extension reports only counts, like clicks, keystrokes and time on a page, and never what you type or copy. Camera processing stays on-device. The optional microphone mode measures loudness only and never records.
HOW IT'S BUILT A local Python app runs Buddy's brain: activity awareness, pet needs and a utility-based behavior planner. It also serves the Buddy website, the voice clips and chat. A browser extension puts Buddy on every page and plays its voice. MediaPipe pose tracking handles webcam presence.
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