Adding MCP Tools to Reachy Mini

The Reachy Mini conversation app can now use tools hosted in public Hugging Face Spaces, called over MCP. You can give your robot a new ability, like checking the weather or searching the web, by adding a Space from the Hub instead of editing the app. The tool keeps running in the Space itself, so no code is downloaded onto your machine. And you can publish your own tools for other people to use.

Below, we look at what a tool is, how profiles control what the robot can use, and the current limits of the remote path.

When you talk to the robot, what you get back isn't only a voice, it's a system that reacts to the conversation: the robot can move and respond non-verbally, when it's applicable. The part we want to focus on here is the tools that make that possible. A tool is something the model can do during a conversation: play an emotion, move the head, look through the camera. Each tool has a name and a short description. The model reads those, decides when one is useful, calls it, and uses what comes back.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Fabien Danieau for proofreading this post and helping test the workflow, to Andres Marafioti for helping test it, and to Remi Fabre and the Pollen Robotics team for the ideas and feedback that shaped the remote tools workflow.

Today every tool is local and ships inside the app, and most of them are about the robot's body:

A tool in the code isn't usable until it's enabled in a profile , a folder with two files that matter here: instructions.txt (the prompt) and tools.txt (the tools that are turned on).

You can also write your own tool: add a Python file to the profile (or external_tools/ ), give it a name and description, and list that name in tools.txt .