GoKawiil🐟 BillAI Bass Builder Guide
Powered by Strands Agents Bidirectional Streaming + Amazon Nova 2 Sonic
billai-bass-demo-strands.mp4
Turn a Big Mouth Billy Bass into a real-time voice assistant: you talk, the fish talks back — head swiveling, mouth lip-syncing to its own voice, tail flapping for emphasis. The fish runs a Strands Agents bidirectional streaming agent ( BidiAgent ) on a Raspberry Pi 5, streaming live audio to and from Amazon Nova 2 Sonic on Amazon Bedrock.
No robotics experience needed. No prior soldering experience needed. The person this guide is based on had never plugged in a Raspberry Pi before and got a talking fish in a weekend.
Inspired by the excellent billy-b-assistant project, rebuilt on Strands.
What's in this repo
File What it is README.md This guide — start here, work top to bottom billy.py The final working Python — the talking fish motors.py Standalone motor test rig — run this before billy.py to verify wiring asoundrc.example The ALSA config that pins the USB mic + speaker as defaults requirements-frozen.txt Exact dependency versions from a known-good Pi build — pip install -r for guaranteed-working setup iot-identity/ Optional production-grade credentials: CloudFormation template + walkthrough for X.509-cert auth instead of access keys
How to use this with an AI assistant
Paste this README into Claude (or another AI assistant) and say: "I'm building this. Walk me through it one step at a time — wait for me to confirm each step before giving the next." That's the way it was built; that's the way it builds best. See the Build this WITH an AI Assistant section below for what to send when stuck.
... continue reading