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Speaking Heptopod

2. Aug 2026 · 1 min read

A translator that turns English text into Glyphs inspired by the heptapods communication system in Arrival, built with Stable Diffusion.

Project

As I am working on a couple of larger projects besides uni, I don't have too much time writing blog posts at the moment. However I used this weekend to finally get back to a project I've been irregularly working on for a while, but sometime dropped without finishing it. I added it to the projects section of my website, so you can check it out there.

If you have seen the movie Arrival from 2016 by Denis Villeneuve, you might remember the heptapods' (the aliens arriving on earth) writing system, which is based on circular glyphs, which closely resemble ink splatters around a center point but convey meaning. If not, go watch it, it's a great movie! Although the movie discusses way more than the writing system, it still stuck to me even years after watching it. So the project was intended to allow me to generate these glyphs from English text, but was never really satisfied with the results. For now only the encoder is there and the deocoder (mapping from glyphs back to English) is still on the roadmap.

A Heptopod glyph for 'Earth' from the film Arrival
The "Earth" glyph from Arrival.

For further details check out the →Project.