The Austin Python Meetup

New location at Brazos Place @ 800 Brazos st. us the entrance on brazos street not 8th.
This is a Hybrid event both in-person and virtual. The in-person event is hosted at Antler downtown Austin.

Address:
Brazos Place @ 800 Brazos st,
The entrance is off of Brazos st.

Talks: Zombie Radio AI - Theatrical improvisation by LLM actors and Human quality Text-to-Speech for a Halloween party

By: Alfredo Valles

Description: Abstract:

Zombie-Radio: An interactive, audio-only theater play performed live by 4 AI voice actors: scientists trapped in a lab during a zombie breakout, broadcasting their struggle over the radio, a throwback to Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds. The twist: the radio occasionally listens. Talk to it (push-to-talk), and the characters answer back, remember your name, and ask for your help.
Three AI models work in concert: an LLM (Nemotron Nano, served by llama.cpp) improvises the dialogue, a voice-cloning engine (Qwen3-TTS) speaks it in four distinct human voices, with a wide range of emotions, and Whisper listens to the audience so they can talk back to the cast in real time. A director (pure Python) conducts the story: it decides who speaks, when events strike and how the mood drifts, constrains the model's output with a grammar so every line arrives in screenplay form, streams lines to the voice as they are written, and trims the script so a show can run for hours without losing its thread. The TTS voices carry emotion, using reference audios from the EARS dataset, supporting up to 22 emotions.
This is a local first project: no AI APIs, and no pre-recorded audio. All AI inference runs on open-source models on a single GPU (Nvidia card +16GB RAM). Don't have an Nvidia card? No problem! We also provide Ansible installation scripts to quickly deploy our AI backend to any cloud VM that attaches an Nvidia GPU and runs Docker containers (e.g., Hyperstack).
The code — two open repositories:

• github.com/alfre2v/TalkWithZombies — the app: a fork of the open-source TalkWithMe that adds the show engine (the Python director, the grammar, the streaming voice, the listener's turn) and the browser stage, styled as an old radio set.
• github.com/alfre2v/zombie-radio — the infrastructure and the record: Ansible and Docker playbooks that stand up the three model servers on a GPU and install the app on a laptop, the tools that cast the voices, and the specs and design discussions from the whole build.

Come for the Halloween horror; stay for the engineering: grammar-constrained generation, a Python director that keeps an improvising model on track, emotional voice cloning, reproducible runs down to the byte, and what it was like to build it all with an AI pair programmer.

Bio:
Alfredo Valles is a backend engineer with years of experience. I love Python, Linux and open source. Alfredo is also a Physicist. Way back he used machine learning in research (before it was cool). Now he is dipping his toes in the brave new world of Transformers AI models.

Antler
Antler works with founders through our signature founder residency, adding value immediately, and taking no equity up front. We receive over 160,000 applications each year to build companies with us, and have grown to 18 funds with residencies in 30 cities around the globe. Founders also have the opportunity to pitch our Investment Committee to receive an up to $500K investment, allowing them to build for 12-18 months rather than attempting to raise before they have real traction.