# Wander: A Screen-Free Voice Companion That Gets You Outside 🌿

> Source: <https://dev.to/manawariqbal/wander-a-screen-free-voice-companion-that-gets-you-outside-1n56>
> Published: 2026-10-11 11:44:13+00:00

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](https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week1-2026-10-05)*

**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.