Sakura is MekaHime's first prototype companion — a mood, a memory, a voice and a body — now open source. Talk to her in a web page (mic or text) where a three.js avatar acts out what she feels on a little countryside street, or point her at a Discord server.

Project page: https://www.mekahime.com/sakura · Source: https://github.com/zeekk0/OpenSakura · Support the project: https://www.mekahime.com/donate

Sakura is MekaHime's legacy prototype: the harness, voice and memory stack from her Discord run, released as-is. She is not representative of MekaHime's newest technology.

Sakura is an adult-oriented companion. At high favorability she flirts and can be sexually suggestive (never explicit); at very low favorability she gets rude. You must be 18 or older, or the age of majority where you live, to run her. The owner flirting can be switched off with reply.intimacy_mode (Setup → Reply behaviour). The full notice is in the About tab of the page.

 you ──mic──▶ STT (MekaHime-modified SenseVoiceSmall, local) ──▶ Sakura brain ──▶ TTS (MekaHime build of GPT-SoVITS, local) ──▶ 🔊
                                                                  │  OpenRouter or Ollama
                                                                  │  26-emotion state · favorability · per-user memory
                                                                  └─▶ action chain ──▶ three.js VRM avatar (26 motions)

Her voice and ears need a local NVIDIA GPU; everything else runs anywhere. Measured on an RTX 5070 (12 GB), semi-local, on replies with 6–10 s of speech: speech recognition ~0.06 s, text reply ~1 s, voice ready ~1.9 s (~2 s after you stop talking); the voice server speaks 7 s of speech in ~0.75 s using ~2.3 GB of VRAM. Fully local is slower on that 12 GB card because the 8B model, speech recognition and her voice share its memory: text reply ~7.6 s, voice ready ~12 s (median of 18 turns); with qwen3:4b, ~1.6 s and ~5 s. Costs are from real OpenRouter billing on 2026-10-24 — see docs/OPENROUTER.md for the key setup, model choice and how to spend less.

• Python 3.11+ for the backend (the text-only mode also runs on 3.13 / macOS). The voice server needs Python 3.11 or 3.12 (on Ubuntu 22.04 install python3.11 and python3.11-venv).
• Voice modes: Windows 10/11 with an NVIDIA GPU (RTX 50-series needs CUDA 12.8 wheels — the setup scripts install them). Linux (glibc 2.28+, e.g. Ubuntu 20.04+) and macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon with a native arm64 Python should work the same way but are untested. ffmpeg is only needed for Opus output (WAV is the default).
• An OpenRouter key or Ollama with a model (ollama pull qwen3:8b)

Her voice is the heart of Sakura, so set it up first. This is for Windows 10/11 with an NVIDIA RTX GPU and takes about 20–30 minutes, most of it downloads (~12 GB). You need Python 3.11 (tick Add python.exe to PATH in the installer) and Git.

1. Install her ears and voice. In PowerShell:

git clone https://github.com/zeekk0/OpenSakura.git
cd OpenSakura
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\setup_windows.ps1   # her brain and ears (speech recognition)
python scripts\setup_tts.py                                          # her voice: type yes to accept her license

Her voice model is free and needs no account. It is a MekaHime asset under a personal-use license: personal, hobbyist use only, 18+, no training other models on it, no re-hosting, and visible credit to MekaHime when you post videos or streams with her. setup_tts.py shows this first and asks you to type yes, then installs on its own (pass --accept-voice-license to skip the question). It ends with a summary; the line that matters is

  OK voice MekaHime_Sakura  ...\Speakers\MekaHime_Sakura (downloaded from MekaHime/MekaHime_Sakura@...; 68/68 emotion tags with a clip; ...)

If that row says !!, see Voice troubleshooting and run the same command again: finished steps are verified and skipped, so a re-run takes seconds.

2. Give her a brain. Pick one:

• OpenRouter (cloud, fastest, about $0.003 per turn). Make an account at openrouter.ai, add a few dollars of credit and create a key at openrouter.ai/keys. Open the .env file in the OpenSakura folder (notepad .env; the setup script created it) and put the key after OPENROUTER_API_KEY=. You can also paste it later in the page under Setup → LLM. Model choice and costs: docs/OPENROUTER.md.
• Ollama (fully local, free). See Fully local with Ollama below: install Ollama, ollama pull qwen3:8b (or qwen3:4b on an 8–12 GB card), then point her four LLM roles at it in Setup → LLM.

3. Start her and say hi.

.venv\Scripts\python launch.py --check   # ends with "result: ready"; look for "OK tts speaker MekaHime_Sakura"
Start_OpenSakura.bat                       # starts her ears, her voice and her brain, opens http://localhost:8010

--check marks real problems !!. A missing OpenRouter key shows as -- (informational), because you can still paste it in Setup. Start_OpenSakura.bat prints STT ready, TTS ready and finally ready → http://…; the first start takes about 30 seconds while her voice warms up. In the page, Setup shows the Health grid: the STT and TTS rows and your brain (OpenRouter or Ollama) should be green (Discord stays red until Discord mode exists). Then Play → click 🎙 and just talk (hands-free, voice activity detection), or hold ⏺ or Space to push-to-talk, or type. She answers out loud with the emotion she feels (【shy1】, 【happy2】, …) and acts it out. Left-drag orbits, wheel zooms, right-drag up/down slides the focus from her head to her shoes; the ❯ tab hides the panel.

More detail (flags, what gets installed where, updating her voice with --update-voice): vendor/tts-engine/README.md.

Her brain can run on your own GPU too, so nothing leaves your PC and nothing costs money.

1. Install Ollama for Windows from ollama.com/download and start it (it runs in the background on port 11434; the tray icon shows it is up).

2. Download a model in PowerShell. The 8B model needs about 16 GB of video memory next to her ears and voice; on an 8–12 GB card use the 4B model:

   ollama pull qwen3:8b     # 16 GB VRAM or more
   ollama pull qwen3:4b     # 8–12 GB VRAM

   (Setup → LLM also has a Pull box that does the same.)

3. Start her (Start_OpenSakura.bat), open Setup → LLM, and in the roles table set provider to Ollama for all four roles (actor, director, action, mod). Check that the Ollama model column names the model you pulled (qwen3:8b by default; type qwen3:4b if you pulled that one), then click Save LLM. The Health grid's Ollama row turns green and the LLM roles row reads actor:ollama director:ollama ….

4. Say hi in Play. From now on launch.py --check also checks that Ollama answers and that every model the roles use is pulled (!! ollama model … missing → ollama pull … tells you what to download).

Measured on an RTX 5070 (12 GB) with everything on that one card: qwen3:8b replies in about 7.6 s with her voice ready after about 12 s, because the model, her ears and her voice don't all fit in 12 GB; qwen3:4b replies in about 1.6 s (voice about 5 s). Smaller models also keep her personality less steadily. OpenRouter is the fastest option if your GPU is small.

On Linux (untested so far), python3 scripts/setup_tts.py installs the voice the same way; the speech-recognition service is set up by hand there (services/stt/README.md), or run python launch.py --no-stt and type.

Text-only, on any OS (no GPU, no voice: she is much less herself this way):

git clone https://github.com/zeekk0/OpenSakura.git && cd OpenSakura
python3 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate      # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env                               # put your OpenRouter key on the OPENROUTER_API_KEY= line
python launch.py --text-only                       # → http://localhost:8010

• Chat in this page (mode: web) — mic/text in the Play tab; replies are spoken and acted.
• Chat in Discord (mode: discord) — not yet available. Setup has the switch, the token field and the discord settings block, and the backend keeps the bot contract (POST /reply, POST /discord/state), but the bot process has not been ported to this repository. Selecting Discord mode today only disables the Play tab. See discord/README.md.

Reply behaviour toggles (Setup): speak replies, respond to typed text, respond to voice, sensitive-word reaction, body actions, intimacy mode (18+). The toggles marked "(Discord mode, coming soon)" do nothing yet.

• Emotion state — 26 emotions in [0, cap]; the actor returns deltas scaled by relationship tier × favorability; they decay over time (negatives fade 3× faster). The face shows a soft baseline of the mood and a full-strength pulse while she reacts/speaks.
• Favorability + promotion — stranger → friend → owner by message count + favorability; the web user is always the owner.
• Memory — one JSON per user under data/memories/; a director LLM pass every N turns rewrites notes, archives finished topics and leaves strategic guidance for the actor.
• Voice — dominant emotion + intensity → a TTS tag like 【happy2】 (S-curve, quadrant lag); synthesized in turn mode (one audio per reply).
• Body — a second LLM call picks 1–3 named motions (from a library of 26) with durations; the page plays them on the VRM and returns to the idle loop, plus a delayed follow-up chain. Every clip can also be played from the State tab.
• Cost — every OpenRouter call records its exact billed cost; the State tab shows session / lifetime totals per role (data/usage.json).

• config/settings.json — everything that isn't a secret (created from the example on first run; live-editable from Setup).
• .env — OPENROUTER_API_KEY, DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN (Setup writes these).
• config/sakura.json — persona and sensitive-word tiers (Setup → Persona, or by hand). A sensitive-word hit does not censor anything: Sakura calls the word out in character.
• Avatar: any VRM at web/assets/avatar.vrm (expressions happy angry sad relaxed surprised, visemes aa oh, blink). Motions: GLB (or FBX) clips listed in web/assets/clips.json; per-clip flags once, fade, speed, clip, rig, hidden, lockXZ. Humanoid rigs (Quaternius/UE5-mannequin, Mixamo, KayKit) are detected by bone names.

• The page shows a small "Support MekaHime" popup two minutes after loading and every 30 minutes; it has a "never show this again" option.
• The voice server sends WAV by default (tts.audio_format), which every browser plays; opus is smaller but Safari cannot decode Ogg/Opus.

• The harness (everything in this repository written by MekaHime) — MIT, as authorized by MekaHime Inc. (LICENSE).
• STT — MekaHime-modified SenseVoiceSmall: code MIT (upstream SenseVoice / FunASR are MIT, see services/stt/LICENSE-SenseVoice); the small support files in services/stt/models/ and the downloaded weights are under the FunASR model license.
• TTS — the OpenSakura voice server, a MekaHime build of GPT-SoVITS: code MIT (vendor/tts-engine/main.py; upstream GPT-SoVITS is MIT and is downloaded by scripts/setup_tts.py together with public models under their own licenses, see vendor/tts-engine/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md).
• Sakura's voice model, fine-tuned weights and reference audio — © MekaHime Inc., personal / hobbyist use only: no distillation, training, extraction, resale or commercial use.
• Sakura's character (design, name, likeness, the VRM) — © MekaHime Inc., made with VRoid Studio. You may publish videos and streams with her (credit MekaHime visibly) and sell up to US$1,000 lifetime of merch with visible credit; beyond that write to hi@mekahime.com. Full terms: About tab → Licenses.
• Body-motion clips (web/assets/clips/*.glb) — CC0 1.0: derived from Quaternius' Universal Animation Library 1 and 2 and KayKit Character Animations (both CC0), plus gestures keyed by MekaHime on top of them and dedicated to the public domain too; sources and credits in web/assets/clips/LICENSE.txt.

Support the open-sourcing work: https://www.mekahime.com/donate