Andres Marafioti

Multimodal Research Lead at Hugging Face, focused on multimodal AI models, vision-language models, text-to-speech, and robot voice interaction projects such as Reachy Mini.

Hugging Face Ships a $299 Hackable Robot for Voice AI Experiments

Andres Marafioti argues that Hugging Face’s Reachy Mini is meant to move robotics experimentation out of expensive humanoid hardware and into a $299-to-$449 open-source platform that users can assemble, repair and modify themselves. The robot’s most-used application is conversation, and Marafioti’s account ties its social ambition to a technical stack built for low-latency speech: Parakeet transcription, Qwen 3.5 27B, and an optimized Qwen3 TTS implementation that he says improved from 0.8x to 5.8x real time.

AI EngineerMay 29, 202612 min read