Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass
What I Built
Wander is a screen-free, voice-first walking companion.
You put your phone in your pocket, tap once, and talk.
It narrates nearby places and species, gives you small “touch grass” challenges, keeps a life list of what you spot, plans walking loops, and logs every walk to a map journal.
The entire brain runs locally with Gemma 3 (via Ollama) + faster-whisper.
Only the voice replies use ElevenLabs (with an offline Piper fallback).
Demo
How it works
Phone (client) ──WebSocket──▶ FastAPI server
│ │
GPS + voice Whisper → WalkAgent → Gemma
│ │
plays audio ◀── mp3 ──────── ElevenLabs / Piper
Key pieces:
- Grounded narration – nearby places (OSM + Wikipedia), species (iNaturalist), weather and sunset are prefetched once. Gemma is only allowed to talk about facts that were actually retrieved.
-
Offline place cache (
poi_cache) – after the first fetch, the walk can continue with almost no internet. - Touch-grass challenges every ~7 minutes.
- Life list – log birds/plants/animals by voice; it tells you when something is new.
- End-of-walk summary – clear spoken recap of distance, species, and challenges.
Why open innovation matters here
A closed cloud model would force every GPS ping and every utterance into someone else’s servers.
Wander keeps the entire reasoning loop local so you can:
- Walk in the mountains with no signal and still get grounded narration
- Keep your location data on your own machine
- Swap models, fine-tune, or change the agent behaviour freely
- Run inference at zero cost after the initial setup
The open pieces (Gemma + local Whisper + open map/species data) are what make the “phone stays in the pocket” promise actually work.
Partner categories
This project is submitted under:
- Best Use of Gemma
- Best Use of ElevenLabs
Built with
- Gemma 3 (Ollama)
- faster-whisper
- ElevenLabs
- FastAPI + WebSocket
- OpenStreetMap / Overpass, Wikipedia, iNaturalist, Open-Meteo, OpenRouteService
- SQLite + Leaflet
What’s next
- Hands-free mode with Silero VAD
- Better journal polish
- Multiple guide voices / Hindi support
Built during the challenge window (5–11 Oct 2026).
Thanks for reading — now go touch some grass.
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