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.