Turtle AI is an AI-powered wildlife monitoring system designed for rehabilitation environments. It is locally-running application that captures snapshots from live RTSP camera feeds and uses an open-source LLM (Gemma 3n via Ollama) to detect signs of turtles in distress. When distress is detected, it sends alerts via Twilio and displays messages in the web interface.
Twilio Account with:
- Account SID
- Auth Token
You must install the following before running this project:
- Python 3.9+
- Docker and Docker Compose v2
- FFmpeg
- Ollama (must be running locally)
- Gemma 3n model installed:
ollama run gemma:3n:e4b
- Create a file named
docker-compose.override.yml
and add your specifiic environment variables (see docker-compose for format and examples)
git clone https://github.com/lynnaloo/turtle-ai.git
cd turtle-ai
docker compose up --build
✔️ The app will now:
- Capture a frame from your RTSP camera every 10 minutes (or your custom interval)
- Analyze the image using Gemma via Ollama
- Alert you if a turtle appears distressed (via WhatsApp)

Here is a YouTube teaser and demo of the project!