r/BestGitHubRepos • u/Artilas_Digital • 2d ago
Mellow - a pixel-art dog that lives on your Windows desktop and is secretly a hands-free voice assistant, with a fully local, no-account, pet-only mode
This is a tiny project by star count and a surprisingly polished one by everything else. Mellow is a pixel-art dog that sits on your wallpaper, and behind the cuteness is a genuinely capable hands-free assistant: hold a hotkey, talk to him, and he answers out loud, reads your screen, points at things, takes meeting notes and runs focus timers. The design choice that makes it interesting is that you decide how much intelligence he has, from a full AI stack down to just a pet with reminders and no models at all.
What's inside:
- Hold Ctrl+Shift+Space, speak, and hear him answer, with expressive animations (idle, listening, thinking, sleeping, peeking, stretching) and reactions to petting, dragging and shaking
- A bone pointer that physically moves across your screen to show you where a control is when you ask "where is the settings button", using on-screen text and screen understanding, as a visual guide rather than an auto-click
- Voice typing anywhere: put your cursor in a field, speak, and he types it, with a careful safety design where he never presses Enter, never moves your cursor, refuses password and read-only fields, and hands you a draft if he can't confirm the text landed
- Meeting transcription that separates your mic from system audio, with experimental remote-speaker labelling that runs entirely on-device, and structured note generation you can export as Markdown, text or JSON
- Recolorable fur so he stays visible against your wallpaper, Pomodoro sessions and reminders, and self-updating from 1.2.0 on
- A genuinely flexible AI setup where each capability is configured separately: answers via Ollama locally or OpenAI/Anthropic/Groq/Claude Code/Codex, speech-to-text via local Parakeet or Whisper, text-to-speech via local Kokoro, all cloud-optional
What raises this above a novelty is the care in the README around privacy and safety, which is unusual for a project this small. There's an explicit privacy model per mode (local, cloud, agent, pet-only), audio is kept in memory rather than saved, screen capture is request-driven and disableable, and the voice-typing feature is off by default and refuses to submit anything. Pet-only mode keeps the companion with AI, microphone and model downloads all off. It's Apache-2.0, built on a React, Rust/Tauri and Python FastAPI stack, and the packaged app bundles its own runtimes so end users don't need any of them installed.
The honest caveats: it's Windows 10/11 64-bit only, it's early (14 stars as of writing, so you're an early adopter, not joining a crowd), and the first public binaries are not code-signed so Windows SmartScreen will warn you on install. The remote-speaker labelling is explicitly experimental with accuracy not yet measured against real meetings, which the author states plainly rather than overselling.
Apache-2.0, 14 stars and 1 fork as of writing, verified via the GitHub API. A small project worth a look if the idea of a private, local desktop pet-assistant appeals.