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 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).
Phone (client) ──WebSocket──▶ FastAPI server
│ │
GPS + voice Whisper → WalkAgent → Gemma
│ │
plays audio ◀── mp3 ──────── ElevenLabs / Piper
Key pieces:
poi_cache) – after the first fetch, the walk can continue with almost no internet.
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:
The open pieces (Gemma + local Whisper + open map/species data) are what make the “phone stays in the pocket” promise actually work.
This project is submitted under:
Built during the challenge window (5–11 Oct 2026).
Thanks for reading — now go touch some grass.