Post
199
→ Try it live: build-small-hackathon/lolaby
→ Watch the demo: https://youtu.be/eY_JnijT62E
→ Read the build journal: https://huggingface.co/blog/build-small-hackathon/lolaby-blog
Every parent, teacher, or babysitter knows the moment. The lights go dim. Blankets come out. Your child asks for a song. Then another. Then suddenly you’re improvising lyrics about dinosaurs, fire trucks, and princesses while trying to convince a little one that it’s actually bedtime.
That’s exactly the problem my partner’s sister faces as a kindergarten teacher. Every day she runs nap time for fifteen 4-year-olds, and ever since they learned about music and instruments in class, it starts the same way: "sing a song for me." She'd love to give each child their own song, built from whatever they love that week, but she doesn't have the time, the musical training, or a tool that could do it. So @volivers and I built one.
Introducing Lolaby — our submission to the Hugging Face Build Small Hackathon 2026, hosted by Gradio and backed by OpenBMB, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Modal, Cohere, JetBrains, and Black Forest Labs.
A child draws something they love (on screen or on paper), a name is entered, and a tiny AI watches the drawing, writes a personalised lullaby, and sings it back.
Everything runs locally. No cloud LLMs. No per-song API cost. No child's drawing or name ever leaves the device.
The full pipeline:
🖼️ MiniCPM-V 4.6 (1.3B) reads the drawing.
✍️ A fine-tuned Llama 3.2 3B writes the lyrics — trained on 1,500 lullabies with strict anti-boilerplate gates.
🎵 Kokoro 82M sings the result over custom DSP instruments.
Drop a like, upvote or comment. Feedback is welcome! 🙏
→ Watch the demo: https://youtu.be/eY_JnijT62E
→ Read the build journal: https://huggingface.co/blog/build-small-hackathon/lolaby-blog
Every parent, teacher, or babysitter knows the moment. The lights go dim. Blankets come out. Your child asks for a song. Then another. Then suddenly you’re improvising lyrics about dinosaurs, fire trucks, and princesses while trying to convince a little one that it’s actually bedtime.
That’s exactly the problem my partner’s sister faces as a kindergarten teacher. Every day she runs nap time for fifteen 4-year-olds, and ever since they learned about music and instruments in class, it starts the same way: "sing a song for me." She'd love to give each child their own song, built from whatever they love that week, but she doesn't have the time, the musical training, or a tool that could do it. So @volivers and I built one.
Introducing Lolaby — our submission to the Hugging Face Build Small Hackathon 2026, hosted by Gradio and backed by OpenBMB, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Modal, Cohere, JetBrains, and Black Forest Labs.
A child draws something they love (on screen or on paper), a name is entered, and a tiny AI watches the drawing, writes a personalised lullaby, and sings it back.
Everything runs locally. No cloud LLMs. No per-song API cost. No child's drawing or name ever leaves the device.
The full pipeline:
🖼️ MiniCPM-V 4.6 (1.3B) reads the drawing.
✍️ A fine-tuned Llama 3.2 3B writes the lyrics — trained on 1,500 lullabies with strict anti-boilerplate gates.
🎵 Kokoro 82M sings the result over custom DSP instruments.
Drop a like, upvote or comment. Feedback is welcome! 🙏
