This Emotional Robot Puts a Friendly — or Not — Face on YouTube and Discord Interactions
Powered by a Raspberry Pi and PyGame, this immobile display-bot offers text-to-speech capabilities alongside an expressive emotional outlet.
Pseudonymous maker "CyberArcher" has built an emotional robot that pulls interactions from YouTube and Discord then expresses its "emotional" reactions — from happy to sad and more — via an on-board display.
"[The robot] gets data from two main websites," CyberArcher explains, "Discord [and] YouTube. It will change its mental status just like me the more you watch [my] videos, the more you subscribe to my channel, it slightly goes insane."
Originally born as a YouTube subscriber counter which, along the way, gained a friendly face, the unnamed robot is built atop a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with a display HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) running a copy of PyGame.
"This robot has different moods and emotions that can be triggered by various actions YOU as a subscriber do to this channel," CyberArcher explains. "It can get sad, mad, angry, happy, and... You casually watching this video will change this channel's overall views, which will increase the happiness in the robot's emotion chart."
Following a series of upgrades, the robot no longer just acts as a visual indicator of the health of a YouTube channel but can now react directly to messages sent via Discord. "There is a channel called Speak," CyberArcher says, "[and] whatever you say there the robot will speak that out loud. I was planning to add ChatGPT support," the maker adds, but at the time of writing the robot was limited to YouTube and Discord interactions.
More details are available on CyberArcher's YouTube channel, but the source code has not yet been released publicly.
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