Building an AI drone companion
that shouldn’t be possible yet.
I’m Yekta. I work a regular call center job, and spend my nights trying to bring Benji to life – a quiet, AI-powered drone companion for your home. It’s ambitious, maybe even unrealistic. That’s exactly why it’s worth following.
A quiet AI companion that lives in the air.
Benji is not meant to be a toy or a flashy gadget. The goal is a calm, helpful presence in your home – able to move through space, understand you, and support you in small but meaningful ways.
At its core, Benji is built around a large language model – a system that can hold conversations, reason about your world, and adapt to how you live. The drone is the body. The LLM is the mind.
I imagine Benji:
- keeping an eye on your home when you’re away,
- helping your kid study or practice languages,
- editing files or browsing the web for you,
- keeping your pet company with movement and voice.
No endless screen time. No sitting in one place. Just a small, mobile companion that can see, listen and respond.
Most AI lives in phones, browsers and speakers. Benji is an experiment in what happens when that intelligence leaves the screen and shares your physical space instead.
Part of the work is giving Benji an expressive, particle-based face – something that can react with emotion, empathy and personality, tightly linked to its "mind" in the LLM.
I know this shouldn’t work. I’m trying anyway.
Benji touches three fronts at once: hardware, AI and human emotion. None of them are easy. Some of them aren’t ready yet. That’s not a bug – it’s the point of the project.
Drones don’t fly long. Not yet. I’m watching new battery tech, fast-charging and energy systems closely – and building with the assumption that flight time will improve.
Nobody wants a loud quadcopter buzzing around their living room. I’m exploring quieter propulsion concepts – from toroidal propellers to more radical ideas like plasma-based systems – with the goal of something truly calm.
A drone that can think, browse, edit and understand you needs serious compute. I’m betting on ongoing progress – including things like light-based processors that generate almost no heat.
I work at a call center. I don’t have a big budget. Most of this runs on free tools, open source models and shared GPUs.
That means progress is slower than a well-funded lab. But it also means something else: if this works, it proves that ordinary people can build extraordinary things – long before the tech is comfortable or obvious.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. I’m not waiting for the future to arrive. I’m building toward it from where I am.
Just one person, a big vision, and a lot of late nights.
Envolate isn’t a lab, a startup or a corporate R&D project. It’s my life’s work in its earliest form – stitched together from curiosity, stubbornness and the belief that some dreams are worth chasing even when they don’t make sense on paper.
My name is Yekta. By day, I answer calls. By night, I try to design an AI drone companion that could one day move through your home, react to your voice, and feel less like a tool and more like a presence.
I document the process – the small wins, the dead ends, the strange hacks and improvised solutions when the budget runs out. It’s not always glamorous. But it’s real.
Even if the business side never works out, I’ll have built something that wasn’t supposed to exist and learned enough to power whatever comes next.
The person behind Envolate and Benji – building this project one late night at a time.
If you like seeing the future too early, this is for you.
Most people only hear about projects like this once they’re polished, funded and safe. You’re early enough to see the messy middle – the part where it might still fail.
By following along, you’ll get:
- behind-the-scenes looks at how an AI + hardware project grows from almost nothing,
- honest breakdowns of what’s possible today – and what still needs the future to catch up,
- a front-row seat to whether an "impossible" idea becomes real.
There’s no promise, no guarantee and no big marketing push. Just a genuine attempt to build something wild, smart and meaningful – and share the process with people who care.
From one prototype to a wider future.
Benji is just the starting point. The same ideas – expressive faces, embodied AI, always-on presence – could live far beyond a single drone.
Imagine talking to an assistant on a website – not as a static chat box, but as a living, learning digital being that can show emotion in real time. Influencers, creators and companies could be present for their audiences 24/7 through AI-driven versions of themselves.
Parts of the work are planned to be shared on GitHub over time, and I’m exploring ways for people to support the project – from small contributions to potential crowdfunding once the prototype is real.