Imagine Build-a-Bear, except the bear talks back with AI.

For Vultr, we turned their beloved stuffed animal mascot Morty, into a realtime AI assistant. We designed a sci-fi style console where attendees could “build” their own Morty by dialing in his personality and bringing him to life.

Each Morty was unique. While all were trained on Vultr’s product line, people could tune Morty’s traits to be funny, sarcastic, or even tailored to a specific industry. Once activated, Morty talked back, answering real questions about Vultr’s cloud products and turning complex tech into something playful, approachable, and useful.

Nerd details: Morty ran on an ESP32 for real-time audio input and output, with the heavy lifting happening in the cloud. We streamed audio from esp32 over websocket to a cloud based Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and a DeepSeek + RAG pipeline that kept latency low so Morty could answer instantly with Vultr knowledge. The control panel was controlled with TouchDesigner, with custom buttons, switches, and sliders wired through a Teensy to give it that retro console feel.