I Revived Wrisha — the Emotional AI Companion I Left for Dead"

What is Wrisha? Wrisha is a desktop emotional AI companion — an animated character who can see you, hear you, talk back, and react. The pipeline is genuinely multimodal: Vision — webcam + facial-emotion detection (OpenCV / FER) Hearing — speech-to-text so you can just talk to her Brain — an LLM generates her replies, in-character Voice — text-to-speech with mood-modulated tone Avatar — an animated face (pygame) that emotes and lip-syncs I built the bones of it a while back, got busy, and walked away. The Finish-Up-A-Thon was the push I needed to come back to it. The "before": it didn't just need polish — it was dead When I reopened the repo, the harsh truth was that the app couldn't even start. Two things had rotted: The environment was a fossil. The project was so old it wouldn't install on a modern machine. Wrong numpy, stale dependency pins, and a Python version mismatch that sent pip trying to compile packages from source and failing. Just getting it to attempt to run took a full environment rebuild on Python 3.12. The code was half-migrated and crashed on launch. I'd previously upgraded the internal modules — memory, a mood engine, a smarter brain — to a "v3" design, but I never finished wiring them into main.py. So the moment it tried to start, it died: TypeError: init () missing 2 required positional arguments: 'memory' and 'mood_engine' The "before" in one screenshot: a project that built its best features and then never connected them. I'd built the hard parts — persistent memory, a smooth mood state machine, proactive behavior — and left them sitting in files that main.py never even imported. Classic abandoned-side-project energy. The "after": three things I finished I set out to do three things, and I'm counting all three as the win. It runs again The core fix was finishing the migration: rewiring main.py to actually construct the Memory and MoodEngine, inject them into the Brain, and reference mood from the engine instead of the dead attribute it used to