Virtual Ofrenda & Story Alchemist: remembering someone with an AI that never leaves your device
What I Built When someone dies, the memories that matter most are rarely the grand ones. They are the yellow cardigan, the Sunday porch, the way someone laughed in a thunderstorm. I wanted to build a small, quiet place to put those down. Virtual Ofrenda & Story Alchemist is a private web app. You t
When someone dies, the memories that matter most are rarely the grand ones. They are the yellow cardigan, the Sunday porch, the way someone laughed in a thunderstorm. I wanted to build a small, quiet place to put those down.
Virtual Ofrenda & Story Alchemist is a private web app. You type or speak a few memories of someone you miss. A small open-weight model, running on your own device, turns them into a short tribute story and a poem, and builds a candlelit digital ofrenda (altar) from the things you mentioned: candles, marigolds, a favourite book, a hot mug of cider.
The theme asked for something that honors the past in the spirit of Día de los Muertos. The ofrenda tradition is much bigger than any app, so I borrowed only its simplest idea: that people stay with us while we tell their stories, and that we make small, physical places to hold them.
The page says "Runs on your device" because it does. There are no accounts, no cloud APIs and no tracking. I tested it in airplane mode.
The video shows the typing path from start to finish: a memory about a fictional woman named Eleanor, then the altar, the story and the poem. I recorded it on the same phone the app runs on, and the waiting in the video is shortened, because generating a tribute takes a few minutes on this hardware.
I left voice input out of the recording. It works, but on my phone Whisper needed about two minutes for an 11-second clip, so typing is the dependable path there.
A private web app for remembering someone you have lost. You speak or type a few memories of them, and a small open-weight AI running on your own device turns those memories into a tribute story and a short poem, then decorates a candlelit digital ofrenda (altar) with the things you mentioned: candles, marigolds, a favourite book, a bright yellow raincoat.
Nothing leaves the device. There are no cloud APIs, no accounts and no tracking. The whole project was built on a low-end device with 2 GB of RAM.
Built for the DEV Hacktoberfest 2026, Week 4 challenge ("Ghost in the Machine").