CuteMeow 可爱喵

A little cat in an e-ink screen
that grows up with your kid.

CuteMeow is an open-source AI companion for children. Hold the button and talk; it answers out loud. It chats, teaches characters and words, and remembers its kid. No big screen, no feed, no ads.

CuteMeow home screen: a dotted-line cat with the date and time on top
Thirteen moods of CuteMeow: happy, listening, thinking, eating, sleeping and more

Three roles, one cat

Not a toy that talks, but a companion that stays useful as the child grows.

Friend

Someone to talk to

Tell it about your day after school. It follows the conversation and remembers yesterday. Feed it, pet it, and it gets happy; leave it and it misses you.

Teacher

Words, letters, handwriting

Ask how a character is written and the screen shows it large with stroke order. Ask a word and you get a flash card. It reads pinyin tones one by one.

Assistant

Remembers what she said

Her name, what she likes: it keeps that and picks up next time. Notes and reminders are in the works. A child's first personal assistant, starting with the smallest things.

What it looks like

A 4.2-inch black-and-white e-ink screen, like a small book. Easy on the eyes, no glow, and it naps to save power when nobody is talking to it.

Pinyin tone card
Pinyin tone card
English word card: apple
English word card
The cat at three sizes, from kitten to grown
The more you talk, the more it grows

How it works

Fully open source. One off-the-shelf dev board plus a server you own.

Hardware

  1. Zectrix NOTE4 dev board: ESP32-S3, 4.2" e-ink display, built-in mic and speaker.
  2. Flash the firmware in firmware/ (ESP-IDF).
  3. Set Wi-Fi and the server address over the USB serial console. Done.

Server

  1. server/ is a small Bun service; the device streams audio over WebSocket while you speak.
  2. Speech in, answer and speech out go through Alibaba Cloud's Qwen realtime omni model, so it answers while you are still talking.
  3. Run it on a computer at home with zero config on the LAN, or deploy to your own cloud server with Docker.

Conversations and the child's memory stay on your own server. No third-party platform in between.