IRL Pokédex
A real-life Pokédex that classifies all 151 Gen 1 Pokémon using a fine-tuned CNN and reads their Pokédex entries aloud with a custom text-to-speech voice.
Overview
- Classifies all 151 Gen 1 Pokémon, 94.71% validation accuracy
- EfficientNet-B0 trained on ~11k scraped images of Pokémon cards, anime, and merch
- XTTS v2.0 voice reads the matching Pokédex entry aloud
- Exported to ONNX for deployment on a Pi Zero 2 W
App
Runs as a Python app on a Pi 5 with a camera, LCD, speaker, and GPIO buttons. Point it at a Pokémon, press a button, and it identifies it and reads the Pokédex entry aloud. Also includes a browseable entry list with sprites and stats for all 151 original Pokémon.
Dataset + classification
Training images were scraped from online searches: cards, anime screenshots, and merch like plushes and figurines rather than just game sprites. After deduplication the dataset came to about 11,000 images across 151 classes. EfficientNet-B0 was trained in two stages, first the classification head then the full network, going from 67% to 94.71% accuracy. The final model was exported to ONNX with class labels embedded.
Text-to-speech
XTTS v2.0 was fine-tuned on audio scraped from the Pokémon show to create a custom Pokédex voice. Flavor text for each species was then pulled from PokeAPI and paired with pronunciation data from a fan wiki so that names get rewritten phonetically before inference. The result is a spoken Pokédex entry for every Gen 1 Pokémon.