Cost-Effective Real-Time Voice AI for Robotics

See a live, cost-effective conversational robot demo using ElevenLabs. Learn the architecture, integration, and cost advantages over OpenAI's realtime API.

Overview

Live demo of a working conversational robot (Reachy Mini) using ElevenLabs AI instead of gpt-realtime, while demonstrating the cost-prohibitive reality of real-time voice models of today

I’ll demonstrate:

The robot having natural voice conversations in real-time (small physical robot will be present)
How I integrated ElevenLabs Conversational AI with Reachy Mini hardware
Why ElevenLabs is dramatically cheaper than OpenAI’s realtime API for applications
Head movement synchronization with speech audio (limited)

This is a working open-source app on HuggingFace that anyone can install. I’ll show the live robot, explain the architecture, and discuss the practical integration decisions that made it work.

Links

Tech stack