Lola-Bla

What it does

She hears them

Reachy plays voice messages from your family's Signal groups, and says who each one is from.

She answers

She just talks. Two beeps tell her when the recording starts and when it stops. She can listen first, then send it or try again.

She rests

Say "go to sleep" (in English, Spanish or German) and Reachy goes quiet. Touch an antenna to wake it.

Safe by design

I built this for my own daughter, so these came first.

Only people you approve. You approve every group and every person, one by one. Everyone else is ignored.
Only family groups. Your child can only send to the groups you approved, never to a stranger.
Stays on the robot. No cloud AI gets the audio of your messages, your contacts or your Signal keys. A recording is deleted from the robot once it is sent.
You always know when it records. Reachy asks if she is ready first, and two beeps mark the start and the end.
A safety profile for Lola. The assistant is written to talk with a small child: warm, simple and age-appropriate. For anything outside its job, it gently sends her to a parent.
The settings are yours. They need your password, and every action is written to a log you can read.

One honest thing: while the app runs, the live conversation is handled by Pollen Robotics' hosted voice service, so what the microphone hears goes there (except while a message is being recorded). I could not find how long they keep it. Read the details and decide for yourself.

Install it

Install the app. In Reachy Mini Control on your computer, open Applications, then Discover Apps, search for Lola-Bla and press Install. If you have Pollen's own conversation app, remove it first.
Start Signal's helper. It is a small program that runs on the robot. The guide has the commands to copy.
Open the settings page in your browser and sign in with your own password.
Link Signal. Scan a QR code with your phone (Signal, Settings, Linked devices). The robot shows up as one more device, like Signal Desktop.
Choose who can talk to your child. Add the family groups and the people you approve.
Start Lola-Bla from Reachy Mini Control and say hello.

The first setup takes some patience and a few copy-and-paste commands. Open the step-by-step guide

Why I made it

I grew up able to pick up the phone and call my grandparents and aunties whenever I wanted. Now I am a foreigner raising my daughter in Germany, far from most of our family, and I wanted her to have that same simple, direct connection, without needing me to unlock my phone every time.

But she is a small child, and I was not willing to hand her a phone or open access to a messaging app. Lola-Bla is my answer to both: a robot she can just talk to, where only I can see or touch the sensitive parts.

I also built it to learn. During my maternity leave I wanted to find out how far I could go with Claude and AI, with my own hands, on a multi-agent project. I learned by making mistakes, and the biggest lesson was that you do not always need several agents: the part that records and sends a message is now plain code, and the whole design is simpler and clearer.

I will keep improving it for Lola, and someday, with Lola.