At Zugvögel Festival 2026, our floor became a church - and what is a church without a confessional? So I built one: a wooden confessional box where festival visitors confess their sins to an AI priest, who teases the juicy details out of them, grants absolution, and then sends them onwards to the Holy Toilet - where their sins, anonymized and retold in an angel’s voice, are played back to whoever is enthroned there at the moment.
AI-Generated
What it is
You enter the box, the door sensor notices, and Father Terminal welcomes you and explains the button. You hold the push-to-talk button and confess. The priest - a large language model with a carefully written persona: warm, solemn, a bit theatrical, entirely un-judgy - reacts, digs one step deeper (“and then what did you do?”), and coaxes a real confession out of you: the snack stolen from a friend, the crush you won’t name, the neighbour-tent incident. After a few turns you receive a short absolution and are sent to the Holy Toilet to complete your penance.
Meanwhile, your confession takes a second journey: an anonymizer pass rewrites it in third person, as if a gossiping angel were reading it from a ledger - all names and identifying details blurred (“a certain gentleman”, “a tent not their own”) - and renders it with a different voice, so the sinner’s own voice never leaves the booth. That retelling is then broadcast in the Holy Toilet: fresh sins play immediately, and when nothing new comes in, random old ones are replayed to keep the throne entertained.
Some of my favourites from the ledger:
How it works
Everything runs locally on one computer in the booth - no cloud, no API calls, no confession ever leaves the church:
- Ears: Whisper transcribes the confession; recording happens strictly between button-down and button-up (open mics near seakers are a lesson I already paid for in blood on the Palapa spaceship).
- Brain: a local LLM served by llama.cpp on an RTX 4080, running two personas in parallel slots - the priest and the anonymizer - so both stay warm.
- Voice: Piper TTS, with separate voices for priest and angel-narrator. The whole thing is bilingual: Whisper detects whether you confess in German or English, and priest and narrator switch language to match.
- Hardware: an ESP32-PoE button box (PTT button + door sensor) talking MQTT to the booth, and a Raspberry Pi with a speaker hidden at the toilet, which caches the sins locally so it survives booth restarts.
- Human takeover: a backstage switch makes the booth announce that “a living servant of the Lord is listening now” and go quiet - a real human takes over, but the mic keeps transcribing, so even hand-taken confessions reach the Holy Toilet.
There are two more features built and waiting for a future edition: a coin acceptor, so the priest can demand a coin of indulgence as if it were ancient doctrine - and dual toilets, heaven and hell, so paying your indulgence decides where your sin gets aired.
And in case you’re wondering about consent: there’s a sign at the door, the priest cheerfully admits when asked that all sins go to the Holy Toilet (“anonymized by the angels”), and the anonymizer has a hard veto for anything that shouldn’t be broadcast, no matter how it’s phrased.