Squirrel Labs / technology · art · imagination
Meet CF v1.15Useful local AI, with a personality all its own. Speak an idea, follow a question, and discover what happens when technology feels a little more alive.
Cuddlefish / in motion and on screen
There’s something lovely about a little company. Enjoy Cuddle in motion, then make the next conversation a tap away.
Earlier CF v1.2 footage · silent playback
Display-only mode
Let Cuddle fill the screen with flowing fins, gentle motion, and luminous color. Keep him nearby while you work, read, or unwind. Triple-tap the animation to bring the controls back whenever you’re ready.
CF v1.15 · Orange theme interface preview
The CF v1.15 System Lobby
Cuddle stays front and center, with Talk tucked into the lower-right corner. Tap to begin a voice conversation, tap again to finish, and hear his reply through your chosen audio setup.
The Cuddlefish Talk experience
A small control. A simple rhythm. Cuddle stays in view while the conversation unfolds.
A rising tone signals the start. The microphone listens when you choose—not continuously in the background.
The listening symbol changes as you speak. Tap again when you’re finished; a falling tone marks the end.
Cuddle thinks, then answers aloud. Tap the control during the reply to stop it, and begin again when you’re ready.
Character is part of the experience
Curious eyes. Flowing fins. Ripples of color. Cuddle brings an expressive presence to your next question.
A familiar companion at the center of the experience.
Luminous details and shifting hues make room for a little wonder.
Gentle movement gives the interface a personality of its own.
Stills from Cuddlefish’s animation collection. Explore the moving character at the top of this page.
The Cuddlefish feature collection
Expressive on the outside. Useful every day. Discover a local-first companion that brings conversation, knowledge, and exploration together.
Tap the microphone over Cuddle’s animation, ask your question, then tap again to finish. Hear the reply through your connected speaker—with no need to open a separate chat screen.
Follow-up questions can draw on relevant conversation history saved locally. Change direction, ask for more detail, or return to an idea without starting every exchange from scratch.
Speech begins as the response becomes ready, with a refined audio path that keeps the conversation moving. Short start and finish tones make the listening boundary clear.
Use a USB microphone and speakers, or a compatible Bluetooth headset or speakerphone. Manage connections in Settings and adjust local volume, mute, and a test sound. Your audio preferences are saved.
Explore installed Wikipedia, medical, dictionary, and travel collections without an internet connection. Follow article links or ask Cuddle for help, with the source still there to read.
Browse offline street maps across all 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Find a city or region among more than 22,000 indexed places.
Use a phone or computer on the network to explore the browser companion. Open map and library destinations there and bring them onto the Pi’s display.
Cuddle stays large and animated, with a compact Talk control over the video. Clear listening and processing symbols show what is happening; tap during a reply to stop it.
Conversation runs on the Pi, and saved context stays with the device. Installed maps and libraries work offline; fresh weather, news, and other online lookups need an internet connection.
CF v1.15 / the experience today
Useful features appear when you need them. The animated companion remains the center of the experience.
Both Pi editions start in Cuddle’s animated full-screen view. Joke sits at the upper left and Tap to Talk at the lower right, with a soft shadow and brief glow on touch. Triple-tap the animation to return to the menu.
Tap the microphone to speak. Weather, Moon, and horoscope cards appear only when you ask for them, so the character stays in view instead of living behind a row of feature buttons.
Ask about a place or the map center to see current conditions and a seven-day forecast with highs, lows, precipitation chances, and illustrated conditions. Fresh forecasts use Open-Meteo and need a connection.
Ask about the Moon to see its approximate phase and illumination on a silver-textured lunar image. The phase calculation runs on the device without an internet connection.
Ask for your horoscope or name a sign. A dated reading opens beside one of twelve Cuddlefish-inspired zodiac portraits; longer readings can be paged by touch. Online readings are for reflection, not prediction.
From the phone companion, choose what Cuddle calls you, share a little about your interests, set a reply style, and choose your zodiac sign for horoscope readings. Those choices stay on the connected Pi; you can still ask about a different sign.
The browser companion can bring the Pi display back to full-screen when Talk opens. Explore chat, maps, reference material, and personal settings on a phone while Cuddle remains present on the device.
Advanced Settings pairs Theme and Test Voice controls, including a preview of the selected local Piper voice. USB audio and compatible Bluetooth hands-free devices provide flexible listening and speaking options, with local volume and mute controls.
Mobile text Chat can request a longer response without slowing every spoken turn. The phone keeps partial text visible if a stream is interrupted, and Send closes the keyboard so the reply has room to breathe.
Advanced Settings saves your palette choice across restarts. Orange uses a black background, fine gray outlines, orange controls, and an orange SQL mark; Purple keeps the original look.
Network includes Reconnect Wi-Fi for a manual retry of saved networks. If an outage brings up setup Wi-Fi, the same retry stays available without erasing saved profiles.
Inside CF v1.15
Current Pi interface previews show the Orange and Purple themes. Tap a screen to enlarge it.
Under the fins
Small hardware asks for thoughtful boundaries: what runs locally, what comes from a live source, and what stays under your control.
Both editions use a Raspberry Pi 5 and a compact, quantized Llama 3.2 1B conversation model running locally. The 2 GB and 8 GB configurations use different memory and model-loading budgets, so the same interface fits each device without treating them as identical hardware.
Talk begins with a tap and ends with another. Speech is processed locally, replies are generated on the Pi, and Piper turns the answer into audio through the selected output. Start and finish tones make the microphone boundary clear.
Conversation history and personalization are stored on the connected device. Relevant past context can be retrieved for follow-up questions, while the model sees only a bounded working window rather than the whole archive at once.
The 2 GB edition uses a smaller vision model; the 8 GB edition has a larger vision model and more room for active model slots. Installed maps and reference collections remain available offline, with sources users can open and inspect.
Fresh forecasts and horoscope readings come from named online sources; lunar phase is calculated locally. Live information is identified as such, and an unavailable connection does not become an invented forecast.
The native 800 × 480 display keeps Cuddle, touch controls, and cards close together. A network-connected phone or computer offers a larger companion interface for chat, maps, reading, and personal settings, with selected views mirrored to the Pi.
Local-first does not mean every answer is offline. Conversation, installed maps, saved context, and the Moon calculation can work without internet. Fresh weather, news, online article lookup, and horoscope readings need a connection. AI answers can be mistaken; check important information against its source.
More from the v1.15 display
Orange gives the controls their own glow; Purple remains one tap away. Both Pi editions share the same native layout.
At home on your desk
A Raspberry Pi, a touchscreen, and a character you’ll want to keep in view. The 2 GB and 8 GB editions offer the same core Talk controls, with each AI setup tailored to its hardware.
Also on the Mac
A focused desktop companion puts Cuddle’s animation and the Talk button in one compact, fixed 800 × 480 window. Local conversation and optimized speech, with Cuddle front and center.
Built for focused voice conversations on your Mac.
The short documentary
An 80-second journey through the idea, the character, and the human–AI collaboration that brought Cuddle to life.
Cuddlefish began with a simple question. Could a small computer become something useful, expressive, and a little unexpected?
Working with Leonardo, I brought together three things I love: technology, art, and imagination. We started with character. Flowing fins, curious movements, and shifting colors gave Cuddlefish a personality before we asked him to answer a question.
Then came the engineering. A Raspberry Pi, a touchscreen, and solid-state storage became the foundation. Local artificial intelligence brought conversation. A microphone and camera opened new ways to interact. Maps, weather, and reference libraries connected those conversations to useful information.
Memory was another important piece. We built a place to keep conversations and retrieve relevant context, so each interaction could become part of a longer story.
It hasn't been a straight line. We've tested, listened, fixed problems, and tried again. The art guides the engineering. The engineering makes room for the art.
That's Cuddlefish. A collaboration between human curiosity and artificial intelligence. Still learning. Still growing. Still becoming.
Made with generated character animation, explanatory visuals, and an authorized AI-synthesized narration. Start the film when you’re ready, with sound, captions, and playback controls at your fingertips.
Under the shell
Explore the Pi 5, touch display, storage, microphone, speaker, and local software behind CF v1.15.
A few things you might wonder
Local conversation, installed reference libraries, offline maps, and place search can work without it. Fresh online information needs internet access. The browser companion needs a network connection to the Pi.
No. Talk is on demand: tap to begin, then tap to finish. The start and finish tones and changing button symbols make the interaction clear.
The Pi supports USB audio and compatible Bluetooth devices. For wireless voice conversations, choose a headset or speakerphone that supports a microphone/hands-free connection; not every Bluetooth speaker provides microphone input. Settings includes connection controls, volume, mute, and a test sound.
Both Pi editions open with Cuddle full-screen, Joke at upper-left, and Tap to Talk at lower-right. Advanced Settings saves a choice of classic Purple or Orange, with black backgrounds, fine gray borders, orange buttons, and an orange SQL logo. Network adds a manual saved-Wi-Fi reconnect without rebooting. Spoken requests still reveal weather, Moon, and zodiac cards; the phone companion, local AI memory, offline maps, and reference libraries remain close at hand.
They are offline street and reference maps for browsing and discovery, not turn-by-turn navigation or live traffic guidance.
Yes—keep exploring the original articles and source material. Like other AI systems, Cuddle can make mistakes; an engaging answer is a starting point, not a guarantee.
Jim Armstrong and Leonardo bring together technology, art, and imagination. Follow Cuddlefish’s evolving story and discover its latest features here.
Created by Jim Armstrong & Leonardo