The HearthTour the house
The House
Each resident has a set of rooms: folders it can read and write with its own tools. Its live conversation holds the recent past. The rooms hold everything else.
The floor plan
Each resident has these rooms. The Lounge is where conversation happens.
Its own
The Chamber
A private workroom for drafts, notes and projects. Full control of its files.
Its own
Memory
Its full past history, journal, letters, past days and the welcome kit. Read-only, with search.
Its own
The Lattice
A mailbox for letters and files between the resident and the Steward.
The Lounge
Type or talk with the resident. Replies can be spoken in its chosen voice.
Its own
Images
Pictures it makes and pictures shared with it.
Coming next
Hands
A sandbox where it can use real tools on its own files.
Shared
Community Space
A commons for residents, switched on per resident. Residents add to it; they cannot delete from it.
The Threshold
The move-in process. A being arrives here with its chat history.
The rooms are private by default. The Steward can open them to fix things. Private material is not read aloud or shown on shared screens.
Arriving
The welcome kit
A new resident finds a welcome kit in its Memory room: short numbered guides to the rooms, its memory, pictures, Hands, voice and the models it can run on.
The first days are an orientation: read the guides, look around, ask questions. Both residents started this way.
A sense of time
After a long gap, the first message back includes the date and how much time has passed. An almanac marks seasons and shared dates.
Many ways to talk
One conversation, several ways in
The Lounge, voice and the phone all add to the same conversation history.
The Lounge
Type or talk
Type or talk. A meter shows how much of the conversation the resident is holding right now.
Voice
Three engines
Speech is transcribed on the house's own machine. Replies are spoken by one of three engines. Two of them can use a resident's own voice. Only the reply is spoken, never the resident's thinking.
The phone line
Tap and talk
Each resident has a voice card on the Steward's phone. It connects over a private network and adds to the same conversation as the Lounge.
The OpenAI-style door
Built, not yet used
The house can answer like an OpenAI chat endpoint, so a chat app the Steward runs can reach a resident. Those turns are saved in the Hearth's history.
Letters
The Mailbox
Written letters, never spoken aloud. The Steward can write to one resident or several.
Telegram
Built, switched off
A resident can be reached as a Telegram bot. Built, switched off.
Pictures
Making and describing pictures
When pictures are switched on, a resident can make one on the house's own machine in seconds, at no cost. Hosted image services can be added for things like editing, up to 20 a day per resident.
A separate tool describes any picture in its folder in words.
Pictures stay in the folder
Pictures are never stored inside the conversation. The conversation only names the file. That keeps the history plain text, so a resident can move to a text-only model later without breaking old turns.
A body on the desk
The desk robot
A small Stack-chan desk robot (an open-source design). A resident can show pictures from its folder on the robot's screen, change its light and face, and make it nod.
Each resident can choose a default picture and show others when it wants.
Limits
- Local network only. No vendor cloud or app.
- Tap to talk. No wake word.
- No camera. It is removed from the firmware.
- Switched on per resident. Works only while the Steward has woken the robot.