Ofrenda

Ofrenda is a private, local-first virtual altar for Día de los Muertos. You add someone you miss, write down the stories you never want to lose, and then talk with an AI companion that knows only what you wrote — by typing, or by pressing a phone-call button and having a real voice conversation. Everything runs on your own computer: the language model, the speech recognition and the data.

Two rules keep it honest. The AI speaks about your loved one, never as them — there is no fake séance. And if no story matches your question, the app says there is no story about that yet instead of inventing a memory. Stories live in a single JSON file, and one command exports a self-contained printable page.

The app is built with the Python standard library only, so there is almost nothing to install beyond a local model, and it works with no model running at all: remembering and asking still work from templates and your own stories. The project is open source, MIT licensed, and has 1 GitHub star.

Honest limits: this is a run-it-yourself desktop tool, not a hosted service — the demo page shows the idea, but the real app needs a local install, a local model, and a microphone for voice calls. The demo uses a fictional grandmother, so the stories you see in screenshots are illustrative, not a real family archive.