---
title: Paw Talk
emoji: 🐾
colorFrom: red
colorTo: yellow
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 6.18.0
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
license: apache-2.0
short_description: A pet's snarky inner monologue, voiced to match the animal.
tags:
  - track:wood
  - sponsor:openbmb
  - sponsor:openai
---

# 🐾 Paw Talk — give your pet its inner monologue

Upload a short pet video; the app watches it and dubs the animal's snarky **inner monologue**
in a voice that fits the animal, in the character style you pick.

Built for the **Build Small Hackathon** · targeting the **OpenBMB MiniCPM** and **OpenAI Codex**
sponsor prizes.

## How it works (MiniCPM + VoxCPM2, on free HF ZeroGPU)

1. **MiniCPM-V 4.6** watches sampled frames → an objective description of the animal & scene.
2. **MiniCPM-V 4.6** (text-only) → infers a fitting voice timbre from the species/size, then
   rewrites the scene into a first-person **inner monologue** in character (thoughts, not narration).
3. **VoxCPM2** speaks it; a per-animal pitch/formant shift pushes the voice out of the "human" range
   so it reads as a small creature.
4. ffmpeg dubs it onto the clip with **time-synced burned-in subtitles**; the voice is stretched to
   cover the whole clip (≤30s).

No model is over 32B; nothing is "right/wrong", so the small models can't look dumb — they just perform.

## Demo & links

- 🎬 Demo video: https://huggingface.co/spaces/build-small-hackathon/paw-talk/resolve/main/demo.mp4
- 🐦 Social post: https://x.com/lnghul413432/status/2066548599224422470

## Architecture

MiniCPM-V and VoxCPM2 run in-Space on **HF ZeroGPU** — the GPU is requested only inside the
`@spaces.GPU` call for each request and released right after, so it is free and self-contained
(no external service, no secrets). Frame sampling, subtitle rendering and ffmpeg muxing run on CPU.