Merlin the Wizard — your desktop's been waiting

Clippy grew up.
Merlin learned to think.

The wizard from 1997 is back — wired to modern LLMs, fluent in voice, and aware of what's on your screen. Floats on your desktop. Bring your own brain.

Windows 10 / 11 · ~200MB · MIT licensed

An assistant that remembers where it came from.

Microsoft Agent shipped in 1997 and quietly disappeared in 2009. Clippy got the cultural memory; Merlin got the cultural shrug. We thought he deserved better — so we brought him back, this time with a brain capable of holding a conversation.

Merlin floats on your desktop the way he always did. Click him, talk to him, let him watch what you're working on. Under the cape: any LLM you like — local via Ollama, cloud via Anthropic / Groq / OpenRouter, or self-hosted via Hermes.

Everything the original wished it could do.

Six things Merlin does well. None of them require a corporate subscription, and most of them run on your machine.

🧠

Multi-brain switching

Pick any LLM and swap on the fly. Local models run private and offline; cloud models give you frontier capability.

Anthropic Groq OpenRouter Ollama MiniMax Hermes

🎙

Voice in & out

Whisper STT in, three TTS engines out — gestures sync to whatever Merlin happens to be saying.

ElevenLabs Edge TTS Whisper

👁

Eyes on your screen

Capture any region and ask about it. Pull in web search when local context isn't enough. He sees, he searches.

Screen capture Web search tool

✦

Swappable characters

clippyjs engine Custom sprites

⌨

Tray & hotkeys

Lives in the system tray with submenus for voice, brain, and character. Global hotkeys to summon him on demand.

System tray Global hotkeys

⚙

Extensions

New in v0.4 — extend Merlin with scripted abilities, new tools, and custom brain controllers. The cape has pockets.

Plugin API v0.4+

Local, cloud, or self-hosted.

Merlin doesn't ship with a brain — you bring your own. Here's the quick comparison.

Brain	Type	Cost	Privacy	Best for
Ollama	Local	Free	Total	Private chat, offline use
Hermes Agent	Self-hosted	Free	Total	Power users, custom rigs
Anthropic	Cloud	API key	Sent to provider	Reasoning, long context
Groq	Cloud	Free tier	Sent to provider	Realtime voice replies
OpenRouter	Cloud	Pay-per-use	Sent to provider	Trying many models
MiniMax	Cloud	API key	Sent to provider	Multilingual workloads

Up and casting in 90 seconds.

No CLI required. Pick a brain when the wizard asks, then start talking.

Install

Grab the latest .exe from GitHub Releases and run it. Merlin appears on your desktop, waiting.

[ installer screenshot — drop into screenshots/install.png ]

Run the Setup Wizard

First-time setup walks you through picking a brain provider, dropping in API keys, and choosing a voice.

[ setup wizard screenshot — screenshots/wizard.png ]

Just talk to him

Click Merlin, hold to speak, or use the global hotkey. Ask about your screen, search the web, swap characters.

[ HUD + chat panel — screenshots/hud.png ]