Narration Subsystem

1. Role

The Narration subsystem generates Bob Ross-style poetic commentary for each drawing job, providing a unique "personality" to the robot.

2. Key Components

• Local LLM: Apertus 8B (Swiss open-weights, based on Llama 3) running via Ollama.
• Model Model: MichelRosselli/apertus:8b-instruct-2509-q4_k_m
• Voice Output: Kokoro (local TTS) with a macOS say fallback.

3. Workflow

1. Prompt Generation: bob_ross.py constructs a prompt based on the drawing job (e.g., "a happy little lighthouse").
2. Narration JSON: Apertus generates a JSON structure containing:

• intro: Spoken before drawing starts.
• commentary[]: A list of short phrases spoken during drawing at regular intervals.
• outro: Spoken after the job completes.

1. Playback: Commentary is spoken in parallel with the arm movements.

4. Notes and Open Points

• Commentary Timing: bob_ross.py uses a hard-coded COMMENTARY_INTERVAL (default 6 seconds). If the drawing is very simple, some commentary might be cut off. If it is very complex, there might be long periods of silence if the list of phrases is short.
• TTS Personality: While the text is generated in the style of Bob Ross, the voice (Kokoro or macOS say) may lack the specific intonation of the artist, creating a mismatch between text and voice.

Sources:

• ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/robot-ross/bob_ross.py
• AGENTS/CONTEXT/agentegra.md
• AGENTS/CONTEXT/robot_ross_artist.md