This GitHub project transforms a Big Mouth Billy Bass into a real-time voice assistant using Strands BidiAgent and Amazon Nova 2 Sonic on a Raspberry Pi 5. The fish responds with head swiveling, mouth lip-syncing, and tail flapping — no robotics or soldering experience required.

The build costs approximately $240 and includes a shopping list: Billy Bass ($30), Pi 5 8GB ($80), power supply ($15), cooler ($10), SD card ($12), USB speaker ($15), microphone ($13), motor driver ($9), jumper wires ($7), soldering kit ($20), and cutters ($9). An AWS account with Bedrock access is needed for Nova Sonic.

Prerequisites cover AWS setup: enable Nova 2 Sonic model access in us-east-1, create a least-privilege IAM user with only `bedrock:InvokeModelWithBidirectionalStream` permission for the specific model ARN, and generate access keys. The guide emphasizes AI-assisted building — paste the README into Claude or another assistant for step-by-step guidance with debugging support.

The repo includes `billy.py` (main application), `motors.py` (hardware test), ALSA config, frozen requirements, and optional CloudFormation for X.509 cert auth. Free-tier AWS credits cover ~100+ hours of conversation; a billing alarm is recommended.