The Council

Inspiration

What it does

Most AI applications today feel incredibly lonely... It's just a user staring at a prompt box, waiting for a single, generic chatbot response. We wanted to build something entirely different using Multi-Agent Systems.

We were inspired by the intense, brilliant dynamics of a real-world executive board meeting. What if you didn't just ask an AI a question, but instead sat across from a physical, opinionated "Council" of specialized expert minds who could debate your ideas, challenge your assumptions, and even argue with one another? We wanted to take AI out of the browser and give it a living, breathing, embodied physical presence.

The Counsel is an autonomous, event-driven multi-agent orchestration engine housed inside a physical desktop device. Instead of giving a single response, it runs a two-phase processing architecture:

The Proposal Phase: The agents review the user's input asynchronously. They evaluate their own confidence, logic, and intent, deciding if they should speak. If you ask a simple question, only one answers. If you pitch a disruptive business idea, the room explodes into debate.

The Generation Phase: The Moderator orchestrates a live debate script based on priorities and confidence metrics.

The physical hardware acts as the interface. When an agent speaks, the system maps their unique voice profile via the ElevenLabs API, while a synchronized physical LED light arrays dynamically change colors to signal who has the floor. The agents don't just talk to you, they actively listen, interrupt, and counter-argue each other in real-time.

Challenges we ran into

Our absolute biggest technical hurdle was the physical hardware integration. We didn't want boring, standard breadboard LEDs; we wanted to orchestrate an external smart LED ecosystem.

This required us to reverse-engineer the proprietary Bluetooth/Wi-Fi control protocols of the smart LED bulb application to intercept its communication pipeline. We had to bridge the connection directly from our laptops and the Raspberry Pi core down to the bulb's internal firmware chip, mapping our core engine’s SpeechProgress amplitude signals directly to the bulb's physical voltage frequencies so it pulsed exactly to the cadence of the AI's voice.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of shipping a complete, end-to-end cyber-physical system in just 36 hours. At a hackathon, it’s easy to compromise and hardcode a demo. Instead, we built a production-ready, fully asynchronous orchestration framework. Seeing five distinct AI personalities dynamically generate an unpredictable, vocal boardroom argument while the physical hardware responds instantly without missing a beat felt like watching magic happen.

What we learned

We learned the massive value of Event-Driven Architectures. By separating our speech pipelines and hardware I/O from the LLM processing layers using an internal message broker, we realized we could completely swap or change hardware targets (like moving from bare pins to advanced real-time systems) without altering a single line of our core agent logic.

What's next for The Counsel

The desktop hub is just the beginning. Next, we want to give The Council human sensory superpowers:

Computer Vision Integration: By mounting a camera and using the Presage SDK, The Council will be able to track user engagement, stress, and facial expressions. If you pitch an idea and your heart rate spikes, the Brutalist agent will call you out on your nervousness.

Long-Term Memory Fabric: Implementing a vector database network so the next time you sit down, the board remembers your past pivots: "Three hours ago you said you wanted to build a drone startup. Why are you suddenly talking about stablecoins?"

Built With

• python