A desktop agent that talks, emotes, and delegates — on purpose

What it does

Amadeus is a real-time multimodal desktop agent: you speak or type, an animated character talks back with synced subtitles and lip movement, and long-running work gets delegated to specialized Providers (Pi for daily tasks, Codex for coding, a managed Browser, optional OpenClaw). The interesting architectural bet is that the character never executes anything itself — it narrates, while a Host layer owns identity, permissions, state, and recovery. Progress, diffs, permission requests, and results stay visible and resumable.

The interesting bit

AUIP, the cooperative application protocol: once a Work task produces a runnable Artifact, the Host issues a short-lived attach ticket binding the session, an immutable Artifact reference, and a TTL. The app can only publish declared state and events — so collaboration with generated apps doesn’t become an execution-authority loophole. Also notable: interruption works across LLM, TTS, and physical playback, which is rarer than it sounds.

Key highlights

• Interruptible real-time voice: two-stage endpointing, AEC/barge-in, local ASR (Qwen3/SenseVoice) and embedded GPT-SoVITS streaming synthesis
• Durable work control plane: Projects, Drafts, WorkItems/Attempts, Continue/Retry, restart recovery, structured diffs
• Per-call approval by default; Main Chat cannot invoke MCP tools directly — a deliberate authority boundary
• Character packs are optional; Chat and Work function without them
• Runs locally with Windows as reference platform; macOS (MPS) and Linux verified, plus experimental AMD ROCm on Windows

Caveats

• This is a 0.17.1 Alpha 1 candidate — buildable source, not a packaged desktop release; the demo video is explicitly “a product slice, not a pixel-exact preview”
• Main Chat defaults to remote DeepSeek; fully local voice is there, but the README is vague on how local-first the chat side can get
• No character packs, model weights, or reference audio in the public source (licensing), so the flagship look requires sourcing your own assets
• AGPL-3.0, which narrows who can build on it commercially

Verdict

Worth a look if you’re interested in agent architecture where authority, permissions, and auditability are first-class — the Host/Provider/AUIP separation is genuinely thoughtful. Skip it if you wanted a turnkey waifu assistant you can install tonight.