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| # Vision | |
| What microquack is for, where it is going, and the constraints that hold | |
| regardless of implementation detail. | |
| ## The goal | |
| microquack is the voice of the microduck robot. One engine — `microquack-core` | |
| (Rust) — is the single source of truth for every sound: the same crate renders | |
| on the website (WASM), in the fitting CLI, and eventually on the robot itself | |
| (native, 48 kHz PCM). TypeScript exists only for the web presentation. | |
| Nothing that affects the sound may exist twice. | |
| The repository is also meant to be exemplary: conformance-tested ports, one | |
| score contract, strict quality gates, and a research trail (`research/`) that | |
| shows how the sounds were derived. | |
| ## The experience | |
| microduck talks **by itself**. Nobody selects presets and nobody has to type | |
| for it to speak. The site shows the robot in a rendered world; it wakes up, | |
| looks around, and babbles droid-speak continuously — mood-shaped phrases with | |
| pauses, like overhearing a small robot thinking out loud. Captions transcribe | |
| each utterance as droid text ("bweep brrrt boo?") with its mood. | |
| The conversation layer is a chat: the visitor reads and writes English | |
| (preset chips or free text), and the robot answers in droid speak with an | |
| English gloss underneath. A very small embedded language model (in the | |
| spirit of [minionese](https://github.com/maddiedreese/minionese)), trained | |
| in this repository and run in the browser, chooses a short English reply and | |
| an emotion; the engine turns that emotion into sound. Speech stays fully | |
| procedural — the model only chooses what to say and how it feels, never how | |
| it sounds. When nobody is talking to it, the robot says something on its own | |
| every 10–15 seconds. | |
| Emotions are first-class. Rust defines 73 child-safe semantic states, from | |
| curiosity and joy to jealousy, shame, grief, and awe. It maps them to 12 broad | |
| voice modes and shared affect values. The English reply carries the exact | |
| meaning; the voice and real robot joints carry its broader tone and energy. | |
| The current eight-emotion model remains in production until the expanded | |
| teacher data is reviewed and a later training run is approved. | |
| ## The stage | |
| The site renders the **real robot** — assembled from microduck's mesh library | |
| and kinematic tree — on the bridge of a spaceship orbiting a planet: a | |
| window band with structural mullions looking out on space and moons, as | |
| realistic as browser rendering sensibly allows. Other microducks (the real | |
| roller variant, in the other real colourways) glide around the bridge doing | |
| chores at the crew consoles. | |
| The camera does not swivel: a fixed, chat-like framing on the robot's upper | |
| body with only the slowest natural drift. Assets are permissively licensed | |
| only (CC0 / public domain / CC-BY with credit); no copyrighted names or | |
| designs, ever. That also applies to audio: | |
| the corpus is fitted only from open-source droid sample packs — never from | |
| film audio. | |
| Motion evolves in the same direction as speech: | |
| 1. **Speech-driven articulation** (current): jaw, head pitch/yaw driven by the | |
| engine's control frames; idle look-around. | |
| 2. **Procedural full-body motion**: weight shifts, steps, gestures synced to | |
| phrase moods. | |
| 3. **Policy-driven motion**: the trained microduck locomotion policies (from | |
| `microduck_rl`, as in the Microduck Sandbox) running in the browser via | |
| ONNX Runtime Web, blended with speech-driven gestures — the duck walks | |
| around its world while it talks. | |
| ## Device parity | |
| Whatever ships here must be directly usable on the robot: | |
| - The robot consumes `microquack-core` as a versioned crate (exact version, | |
| or an immutable git revision until published) — never vendored source. | |
| - 48 kHz is the canonical device output rate; scores are written in seconds | |
| and hertz so they are sample-rate independent, and the renderer owns all | |
| rate-specific behavior. | |
| - `Engine::render_into` feeds the robot's PCM path in blocks; | |
| `Engine::control_frame` drives the physical beak and body the same way it | |
| drives the 3D model. | |
| ## Non-negotiables | |
| - One engine. Ports and hosts are bindings, not implementations. | |
| - Behavior changes to the engine require updating the conformance fixtures | |
| deliberately, never silently. | |
| - Everything audible is synthesized from a JSON score at runtime. | |
| - No copyrighted audio or 3D assets; the corpus sources are the open-source | |
| packs credited in `research/README.md`. | |