Project HailMary

Inspiration

Rocky from Project Hail Mary represents a truly different kind of intelligence—empathetic, collaborative, and embodied. We wanted to recreate that feeling in the real world: not just a chatbot, but a physical companion that can communicate, react, and exist socially. The long-term vision is a social world action agent that can perceive, reason, and act in human environments.

What it does

Project HailMary is a voice-first robotic companion built with Reachy Mini and Boson AI TTS. It can speak expressively, respond to users in real time, and convey personality through both voice and physical presence. The system focuses on emotional interaction and natural dialogue, creating a sense of companionship rather than just task-based responses.

How we built it

We combined Reachy Mini for embodiment and motion with Boson AI TTS for expressive voice generation. A real-time interaction loop handles speech, dialogue, and personality-driven responses. The architecture is designed to support multimodal perception and future extensions toward autonomous actions.

Challenges we ran into

Making the voice feel expressive and emotionally aligned with personality

Synchronizing physical embodiment with conversational timing

Keeping latency low for real-time interaction

Designing behaviors that feel like companionship instead of scripted responses

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Created a believable voice-driven robotic companion

Achieved real-time interaction with expressive personality

Successfully integrated embodiment with conversational AI

Established a foundation for a social world action agent

What we learned

Embodiment dramatically changes how users perceive AI

Voice tone and pacing matter as much as content

Small physical cues increase emotional connection

Real-time interaction is essential for believable companionship

What's next for Project HailMary

We aim to evolve Project HailMary into a true social world action agent. Future work includes multimodal perception, memory, proactive behaviors, and the ability to take actions in the physical and digital world. The goal is a companion that not only talks, but understands context, collaborates, and participates meaningfully in everyday life.

Built With

• boson
• mini
• reachy