Plenty of Pokémon fans and engineers have created working Pokédexes complete with image recognition to let you scan toys and art to identify your favorite monsters. BigRig Creates and Mr. Volt have taken this a step further, creating what they’re calling the “World’s Smartest” Pokédex, capable of not only recognizing Pokémon, but giving you data about them from the games, acting as a voice assistant, and much more.
Mr. Volt is planning to release a video about the hardware side of things at some point in the future, but BigRig Creates has already put out a 13-minute rundown of how he accomplished all the image recognition and data dumps, and recreated a voice that sounds similar to the original anime’s Pokédex.
Much of the coding under the hood draws from the Pokémon Database, which includes lengthy Pokédex entries for all 1025 monsters, complete with stats, learnable attacks, locations in each game, and more. So now, the World’s Smartest dex can tell you pretty much anything you need to know about a Pokémon just by scanning an image of it. The device uses a reverse Google image search to name whatever monster you’re pointing it at, and it can identify anything from plushies to fan art.
The voice, however, needed some tweaking, so BigRig Creates used his own voice to create an AI text-to-speech voice model that sounded closer to the original but didn’t rip the lines from the show. He says this was in an effort to use the tech to make something “ethical” and “homegrown” rather than training it on the performances of actors Nick Stellate and Eric Stuart from the anime.
Seeing the completed dex in action is pretty impressive. It correctly identifies several Pokémon, including a Ditto disguised as a Poipole, from toys, plushes, and some hastily drawn Remoraid fan art. It couldn’t quite wrap its head around a Spinda Labubu, though. No tech is perfect, I suppose.
