Luke Creatives Spent Eight Months Building a Voice Powered AI Soda Machine That Mixes Any Flavor You Can Speak

Luke Creatives spent more than eight months on a soda machine that listens to a spoken request and mixes a drink from a bank of concentrated flavors. Ordinary fountain buttons give you one listed option. This cabinet aims at anything you can say out loud, from strawberry lemonade to a summer night, and it draws on roughly half a million possible mixes to do it.

Ordinary soda fountains lock you to a short printed list. Luke wanted a machine that could connect an idea to a taste, the way a midsummer night or a thunderstorm might feel if you had to drink it. He treated flavors like primary colors, believing that with enough base selections, you could achieve practically any desired result. Claude assisted him in selecting twenty concentrations that would provide them with the most variety, including one that is said to taste like freezing cold. Although two of them (lavender and capsaicin) refused to dissolve in water, they were replaced with cardamom and crème de menthe. That left them with about 18 bottles that actually worked and hundreds of thousands of possible combinations.

Voice control is based on a Raspberry Pi and includes a touch screen and microphone, making it an all-in-one device. Hold down a button and chat, and Google Gemini will hear what you say and write down a recipe with measured doses to use before sending the information to the pumps. A large peristaltic pump circulates pre-carbonated water through a silicone tube, ensuring that the liquid never contacts the motor parts. There are twenty smaller pumps that perform the same thing with the flavor vials, first flushing the flavors through the system and then introducing water to mix them up in the cup. There is no carbonator inside the box; instead, the team uses bottled sparkling water to save money and simplify plumbing.


Before the finished cabinet could be built, Luke had to develop a smaller version of the system consisting of a single Pi, screen, microphone, and pump to test the concept. If that didn’t work, he assumed the entire thing was doomed. Scaling it up nearly ruined the entire project, as the first circuit board with two copper layers became a nightmare when they tried to add twenty-one pumps and a Pi. Josh at VentureVici solved the problem by building a six-layer board using GPIO expander chips and I2C, allowing the computer to communicate with each pump via a single wire. JLCPCB constructed the boards, however they still managed to fry a handful of Raspberry PIs due to power issues, and one of the finished boards was also destroyed. Half of the tiny pumps arrived with incorrect settings and had to be manually switched around, while early tube rips caused leaks over the electronics.


They discovered the ideal enclosure for the machine on eBay: an old reverse osmosis filter housing. A flavor train of glass vials and pumps was fixed inside the cramped space, held together with hot glue and whatever else they could think of. Claude offered some very valuable dilution tables to keep each flavor at a manageable strength so that one flavor did not overshadow the others. Before they began testing with drinks, they conducted a few test runs with simply water to identify leakage.


When they finally had a drink that didn’t leak all over the place, they began to experiment with other flavor combinations. The family who assisted recognized a few popular refreshments, including strawberry lemonade, rocky road fudge ice cream, and blue moon ice cream. Then some unexpected ones came about, such as a summer night with vanilla and hibiscus, a thunderstorm with ginger and fire, and grief with a salty and muted flavor. Pine tree tasted similar to a heavy version of Sprite, but with a foresty touch. After the pour, Gemini Live even spoke back to them in a natural voice.