This Robot Thinks It Is Aristotle

One exciting (or maybe disturbing) capability of a modern LLM (large language model) is the emulation of a public figure’s personality and diction. An LLM can act like anyone, including historical people and even fictional characters. Nikodem Bartnik used that capability to build this robot that speaks like Aristotle.

This robot is a face with moving eyes, which users can talk to. When they do, it will respond as if it were the famously wise polymath Aristotle. It has an accent that feels more cowboy than Greek, but we’ll let that slide — we really don’t know what Aristotle sounded like anyway.

To make this work, Bartnik combined several different services, products, and open source projects. The animatronic eyes are Will Cogley’s design, with servos controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico. The face is a 3D-printed mask modeled by Rott3D on Printables. The LLM is Google’s Gemma running on a local PC with Ollama. A Raspberry Pi listens to the user through a microphone, sends queries to the local PC running Gemma, then responds through speakers. ElevenLabs gives that response a realistic human voice.

Put all of those puzzle pieces together and you get this philosopher bot.