I built a screen-free, storytelling toy for kids with Qwen3-TTS

I built an open-source, storytelling toy for my nephew who uses a Yoto toy. My sister told me he talks to the stories sometimes and I thought it could be cool if he could actually talk to those characters in stories but not send the conversation transcript to cloud providers.

This is my voice AI stack:

1. ESP32 on Arduino to interface with the Voice AI pipeline
2. MLX-audio for STT (whisper) and TTS (`qwen3-tts` / `chatterbox-turbo`)
3. MLX-vlm to use vision language models like Qwen3.5-9B and Mistral
4. MLX-lm to use LLMs like Qwen3, Llama3.2
5. Secure Websockets to interface with a Macbook

This repo supports inference on Apple Silicon chips (M1/2/3/4/5) but I am planning to add Windows soon. Would love to hear your thoughts on the project.

This is the github repo: https://github.com/akdeb/open-toys