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.

Adding a tool takes one command:

reachy-mini-conversation-app tool-spaces add pollen-robotics/reachy-mini-weather-tool

Then start the app as usual:

reachy-mini-conversation-app

Now you can just ask:

What's the weather in Paris today?

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

Built-in tools

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.

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

Tool	What it does
move_head	Queue a head pose change
dance / stop_dance	Play or clear a dance from the dances library
play_emotion / stop_emotion	Play or clear a recorded emotion clip
head_tracking	Toggle head-tracking offsets
camera	Capture a frame and analyze it
idle_do_nothing	Explicitly stay idle on an idle turn

How profiles control tools

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).

The default profile enables the full set:

If a name isn't in tools.txt, the model can't call it.