Adding MCP Tools to Reachy Mini

Summary

Reachy Mini’s conversation app can now call tools hosted in public Hugging Face Spaces through MCP, allowing capabilities such as weather checks and web search to be added without editing the app or downloading tool code locally. The app retains built-in robot tools and custom local tools, while profiles use tools.txt to control which tools the model may call. The tool-spaces command validates a Space, probes its MCP endpoint, discovers tool IDs, and can append them to a selected profile; remote names are namespaced to avoid collisions. The feature supports public MCP-compatible Gradio Spaces, multiple Spaces, and backend-agnostic registration, but not private or authenticated Spaces, non-Gradio Spaces, arbitrary MCP URLs, or guaranteed parallel orchestration.

Takeaways

1. 1

   A remote tool is usable only when its discovered ID is listed in the active profile’s tools.txt, alongside any enabled built-in tools.

2. 2

   The installation flow supports public MCP-compatible Gradio Spaces and multiple Spaces, but rejects private or authenticated Spaces, non-Gradio Spaces, and arbitrary raw MCP URLs.

3. 3

   Prompt instructions can encourage parallel calls for combined weather and search questions, but deterministic parallel orchestration must be implemented in code.