The whole stack — extension, backend, persona kernels, Director, fact-check pipeline — is in one repo. Clone it, follow the operator’s manual, run it on your own machine.
View source on GitHub →The backend is a Next.js app. Node 20 or newer covers it. nvm use 20 if you have Node Version Manager.
Chrome is the simplest path. Edge, Brave, and Arc all work too — they’re built on the same engine. The extension uses the Side Panel API, which needs Chrome 116 or newer.
Deepgram (transcription), Anthropic (Claude Haiku for fact-checker + comedy), xAI (Grok for heckler + sound guy + Live Search). All three ship free tiers. Roughly $1/hour at full tilt.
git clone https://github.com/Sethmr/peanut.gallery.git — the whole stack lands in a single repo (extension, Next.js backend, persona kernels, Director, claim-detector, fact-check pipeline).
The operator’s manual is the canonical setup walkthrough. The README and the docs/ directory cover everything else.
Copy .env.example to .env, paste your Deepgram, Anthropic, and xAI keys. npm install && npm run dev from the repo root spins up the Next.js backend on localhost:3000.
You are now running the AI compute on your own hardware with your own provider accounts. Manu Games LLC is not in the loop for sessions you operate.
Go to chrome://extensions, flip on Developer mode (top-right), click Load unpacked, and point Chrome at the extension/ directory in the cloned repo.
Open the side panel on any YouTube tab and press Start Listening. The four AI critics react in real time, talking to the backend you just spun up.
Self-hosting is not just a technical exercise — it shifts the legal posture. When you run the backend on your own machine and use your own API keys, you are the entity producing the speech the personas generate. Manu Games LLC is no longer the speaker, and is no longer the publisher under any defamation analysis. That responsibility transfers to you.
Concretely, as a self-host operator, you carry exposure for:
Read the terms and privacy pages and the operator’s manual before you stand up a hosted instance for anyone besides yourself.
The operator’s manual documents the full self-host workflow — sourcing API keys, writing your own persona pack, running the backend, daily operation, and troubleshooting. Source-of-truth for everything below the “clone the repo” line above.
Manu Games LLC is preparing a different product (a games launch) and made the call to retire the AI-persona extension as a commercial product before that launch. The legal exposure of operating live AI personas about real people in shipped video tabs — defamation, right-of-publicity — doesn’t fit the LLC’s posture going forward. The source remains MIT-licensed for anyone who wants to run their own copy.
No public, advertised one. The original Plus tier (a flat-rate $8/mo hosted backend) was planned but never shipped. If you want the AI to run, you self-host the backend on your own machine with your own API keys.
An API key is a private string of letters and numbers a service gives you when you sign up — think of it as a password your self-hosted backend uses to talk to that service on your behalf. You need three: Deepgram (transcription), Anthropic (the fact-checker and joke writer voices), and xAI (the heckler and sound-guy voices, plus Live Search for fact-check receipts). All three ship free tiers that cover casual use.
Your tab’s audio is sent from your machine to the AI providers (Deepgram, Anthropic, xAI) under your account, not via Manu Games. Audio is streamed in real time, transcribed, and discarded — nothing is recorded. YouTube can’t detect the extension (it uses Chrome’s built-in tab-audio feature, the same kind of thing meeting tools use). The extension does nothing when no session is running.
Yes — MIT license. Two notes: (1) the “Peanut Gallery” name is a Manu Games trademark, so rename your fork; (2) once you ship, you’re the operator and the publisher, with everything that implies. The walkthrough above spells it out.
Yes. Those browsers are built on the same engine as Chrome and support unpacked-extension loading via the same chrome://extensions path. Firefox and Safari are not supported — the extension uses Chrome-specific APIs (chrome.tabCapture, the Side Panel API).