> In the US, about 1/5 children are hospitalized each year that don’t have a caregiver. Caregiver such as play therapists and parents’ stress can also affect children's emotions.
Trust me, large language models are not anywhere close to being able to substitute as an effective parent, therapist, or caregiver. In fact, I'd wager any attempts to do so would have mostly _negative_ effects.
I would implore you to reconsider this as a legitimate use case for your open device.
> We believe this is a complement tool and it is not intended to replace anyone.
Well which is it? Both issues you list heavily imply that your tool will serve as a de facto replacement. But then you finish by saying you don't intend to do that. So what aspects of the problems you listed will be solved as a simple "complement tool"?
I had a quite good social sciences teacher.
I never forget one of his remarks: There can be only one thing that is worse than someone not having a mother - that he has one.
So maybe a chatty LLM is not the worse thing that can happen with someone.
> In fact, I'd wager any attempts to do so would have mostly _negative_ effects.
It does kinda send an interesting message to a child, doesn't it? "You're not worth the time of anybody human, so here's a machine instead."
And that's before the chat even starts (and eventually goes off the rails).
Like in pederatic care, not every child has a parent who takes good care of them. In hospitals, it is more often play therapists who do this work, but their negative stress can also affect children's emotions. For example, some children feel very traumatized before doing line placement/blood test. This tool can help explain the specific process to them using empathic language and encourage them on specific topics.
I mean doctors and play therapists still have to do their job, We have interviewed some doctors who feel particularly frustrated about how to comfort children before tests or surgeries. They hope for a tool can help building comfort for kids -> which means time is faster to run tests.
> Trust me, large language models are not anywhere close to being able to substitute as an effective parent, therapist, or caregiver.
You're asking us to trust you, but why should we trust you in this matter? Regardless of if I think ChatGPT is any good at those things, you'd need some supporting evidence for that one way or another before continuing.
It's an expression. In this context I just meant "it should be obvious". Maybe try steel-manning my argument first. If you really can't see why that's likely the case after using a LLM yourself, then I'll be happy to admit that I'm making an emotional argument and you're in no way required to "trust me".
https://chatgpt.com/share/6701aab3-2138-8009-b6b8-ec345b4382...
Why is that "not anywhere close to being able to substitute as an effective parent, therapist, or caregiver."?
Maybe I've had a bad parents/therapists/caregivers all my life, but it seems like an entirely reasonable response. If there's a more specific scenario you'd like me to pose and show me that it's advice is no good, I'm happy to ask it.
I gladly admit that I was making an appeal to emotional intelligence and you won't likely agree with me no matter what back and forth we go through.
Honestly I don't see it as an "obvious" thing.
I won't be surprised if in a couple more years this kind if thing is the norm. I don't think there's anything inherently different from a person that listens to you.
It wasn't obvious for a long time, but the closest we have to a relevant experiment* shows that physical contact is also necessary for parenting, especially soft contact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
Humanoid robots are improving, so I won't say "never", but I will say "not yet". Not in isolation at least.
* and likely the closest we ever will, because it was disturbing enough to a big influence on animal welfare movement
I'm at a loss for words. If you really think there's no difference between a human and a machine, I don't know what to tell you.
>I would implore you to reconsider this as a legitimate use case for your open device.
OP, I would implore you to not listen to any of this "advice" at all and just keep on building really nice things.
I can already think of a dozen valuable applications of it in a therapheutic context.
Ignore those who don't "do".
> Ignore those who don't "do".
I'm actually pretty ok with ignoring those who don't "think" before they "do", not that the OP is one of those people, but "doing" as a mark of virtue seems fairly likely destructive
One day of doing is worth a billion years of thinking.
The world is material, not imaginary.
Thank you for all your advice.
I don't want to criticize a cool project but why do people feel the need to create new hardware for AI things? It was the same thing with the rabbit r1. Why do I need a device that contains a screen, a microphone and a camera? I have that, it's called a smartphone. Being a bit smaller doesn't really help because I have my phone with me almost all the time anyways. So it's actually more annoying to carry the phone and the new device instead of just having the phone. I would be happy with it just being an app.
I can answer to this, having worked on an assistant that is always on, from your phone.
The platforms (ios, Android, etc.) are very limiting. It is hard to have something always on and listening. Especially apple is aggressive with apps running in the background.
You need constant permissioning and special privileges. The exposed APIs themselves are not enough to build deep and stable integrations to the level of Siri/Google Assistant.
Oh, I didn't get that it's supposed to always be listening. Maybe I'm not the target audience but I wouldn't want that anyways. If that's important, that might be a good reason. I think this needs to change in the future though if AI agents are supposed to become popular, I can't imagine buying separate hardware every time. Either the integration in the OS needs to become better or Google/Apple will monopolize the market and be the only options.
> Oh, I didn't get that it's supposed to always be listening. Maybe I'm not the target audience but I wouldn't want that anyways.
I don't know about this project, but generally when a voice assistant is "always listening" they mean it's sitting in a low power state listening for a very specific trigger like "Hey Siri" or "OK Google" and literally nothing else. As much as they would probably like to have it really listening all the time, the technology to have a portable device run actual speech recognition and parsing at all times with useful battery life doesn't really exist yet.
You are right, “always listening" they mean it's sitting in a low power state listening for a very specific trigger like "Hey Siri" or "OK Google" and literally nothing else.
Yes, I thought it was button-triggered.
Yes it does. A Nvidia Jetson Nano with a microphone running Whisper with a banana sized battery will give you 8 hours of transcription.
If you have a separate -dedicated- Android smartphone for this task, why wouldn't the app run in the foreground?
We definitely need an alternative to the duopoly iOS/Android
I don't think you're their target audience. I'd love something like this for my kid (who isn't ready for a smartphone).
Other problems are persistence. Have you looked at how hard it is to keep an app running in the background on an iPhone? on a Samsung phone? For an app that needs to be always-on, it's a non-starter unless you're Apple or Google respectively.
Apple would stop you from scooping up all that delicious delicious data. Google probably would too. Always-on listening requires building e-waste.
>why do people feel the need to create new hardware for AI things?
Because people have agency and hobbies, and they're free to decide what to spend their money and time on.
I was a solo latchkey kid from age... 5 or 6 maybe? I developed a love of reading and spent basically all my waking hours that weren't forcibly in the company of others doing that, by myself: summertime in San Diego, teenage me read 2-4 books a day. I grew up to be incredibly introverted (ironic that I work as a product manager, which strongly favors extroverts) and I wonder how differently I might have turned out if a digital companion had urged me to be more social (something my parents never did), or just interacted with me on a regular basis.
This tool requires a paid subscription, but it doesn't say how much. The hardware is affordable, but the monthly fees may not be. Also, the hardware is only useful as long as the company's servers are up and running -- better hope they don't go out of business, get sold, etc.
Sorry for the confusion, we are still discussing the paid subscription pricing, but I can be sure that the price of premium subscription will not be higher than $9 per month.
In the 2001 movie AI, the protagonist children play with an "old" robotic teddy bear named "Teddy".
The bear's movement isn't great, and its voice sounds robotic. Projects like this make me think that Teddy either could be built with today's tech, or is very close to being buildable.
Personally I have found talking to AI to be much more draining than typing. It's a bit like having a phone call vs IM. I'd basically always prefer IM as long as I'm getting quick responses.
Since the new OpenAI voice model launched, I feel the opposite. Some of the responses me and my gf have gotten from it were fantastic. It’s really good at role play and using intonation now. And you can interrupt it halfway through a response if it’s going off track.
For example, I spent 20 minutes the other day talking through some software architecture decisions for a solo project. That was incredible. No way I would have typed out my thoughts as smoothly.
I still use text most of the time (technical or complex problems, copy pasting materials...), but for things like language learning or getting answers while commuting/walking, voice is a no-brainer.
I want to talk my input and read its output. Both are faster.
For the use case that this project is for?
Yeah, I know your point. Compared with human communication, I think talk with AI can be self-paced.
This seems to be yet another reckless and dishonest scam from yet another cohort of AI con artists. From starmoon.app:
> With a platform that supports real-time conversations safe for all ages...Our AI platform can analyse human-speech and emotion, and respond with empathy, offering supportive conversations and personalized learning assistance.
These claims are certainly false. It is not acceptable for AI hucksters to lie about their product in order to make a quick buck, regardless of how many nice words they say about emotional growth.
Do you have a single psychologist on your staff that signed off on any of this? Telling lies about commercial products will get you in trouble with regulators, and it truly seems like you deserve to get in trouble.
These claims are certainly not false. They described ChatGPT.
> It is not acceptable for AI hucksters to lie about their product in order to make a quick buck
You created a fake/throwaway just to make posts with this kind of cheap insults?
hey there I am one of the founders. this is our project which we are trying to grow through open-source. I agree our wording can be better so its backed by data and not just a marketing stint.
> Do you have a single psychologist on your staff that signed off on any of this?
We've been talking to pediatricians at portland hospital and cromwell hospital in london to support the "safe for all ages" claim but I agree that we want to back all our claims with data
Can you please elaborate on why this is 'certainly false'? What is missing?
To me, it looks like you have some experience with the topic and believe that it is very hard to build something like the device in question, but which properties of the solution make you so certain?
The primary thing that's missing is any evidence that the claim is true, or even plausible. There's no indication that they even tested this with kids.
I don't take advertising at face value, even if that advertising might appeal to sci-fi sensibilities. Your question has an air of "well you can't PROVE the flying spaghetti monster is false."
I think this is great, ignore the people comparing your project to the commercial Rabbit R1 project, those people are comparing apples and oranges.
A lot of the subscription based pull ins could be replaced by networking into a machine running whisper/ollama etc anyway.
Keep up the great work I say :)
Is this specific hardware necessary? If I wanted to run this on a Raspberry Pi zero, for example, is that possible?
Sorry, it currently support esp32-devkit and Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32S3. For the Raspberry Pi Zero, you may need to switch to a different PlatformIO environment and replace the corresponding GPIO pins.
I can see something like this being used in various inspection scenarios. Instead of an inspectior having to fill out a template or fiddle with an ipad-thingie in tight situations they can talk to this, and a LLM converts it to structured data according to a template.
I predicted a Teddy Ruxpin / AG Talking Bear driven by LLMs a while ago. My biggest fear is that the Christmas toy of the year would be a mass produced always listening device that's effectively constantly surveilling and learning about your child, courtesy of Hasbro.
Any plans for being able to run the entire thing locally with local models?
You can make an OpenAI compatible local server using LMStudio[1] and load any model you want. It'd have to be on another host though, the s3 has some inference capabilities with addons afair, but nowhere enough grunt to run locally at any usable token/s
I'd love a hardware device that streamed the audio to an HTTP endpoint of my choosing, and played back whatever audio I sent. I can handle the rest myself, but the hardware side is tricky.