> 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).

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.

> 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.

I'm not trying to shit on this but the world seems to have jumped headfirst into dystopian Black Mirror episodes. It looks like people too young for children thinking AI technology is the answer.

Again, not shitting on the people creating this and this is the forum for it, but I feel all of this is just such a wrong direction for people and humanity in general.

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.

[flagged]

>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".

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.

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.

We definitely need an alternative to the duopoly iOS/Android

>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.

Apple would stop you from scooping up all that delicious delicious data. Google probably would too. Always-on listening requires building e-waste.

because these devices are intended to be always on, which is not possible with iphone?

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.

Thanks for the useful feedback. I just updated our product page with the subscription price.

Since you can use docker for our backend, you can self-host your own service with our hardware. You can use our subscription only if you want us to handle the STT/TTS/LLM costs

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.

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?

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

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?

Neat! How can I help you? I think our devkit's components will help you get started. Here is the main.cpp code for this

``` /* * @file streams-i2s-webserver_wav.ino * * This sketch reads sound data from I2S. The result is provided as WAV stream which can be listened to in a Web Browser * * @author Phil Schatzmann * @copyright GPLv3 /

#include <WiFi.h> #include "AudioTools.h"

const char ssid = "<stavros_ssid>"; const char *password = "stavros_pw"; AudioWAVServer server(ssid, password);

I2SStream i2sStream; ConverterFillLeftAndRight<int16_t> filler(LeftIsEmpty); // fill both channels - or change to RightIsEmpty

void setup() { Serial.begin(115200); AudioLogger::instance().begin(Serial, AudioLogger::Info);

    //   // Connect to Wi-Fi
    Serial.println("Connecting to WiFi...");
    WiFi.begin(ssid, password);
    while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED)
    {
        delay(1000);
        Serial.println("Connecting...");
    }
    Serial.println("Connected to WiFi");

    // Print the IP address
    Serial.print("IP address: ");
    Serial.println(WiFi.localIP());

    // start i2s input with default configuration
    Serial.println("starting I2S...");
    auto config = i2sStream.defaultConfig(RX_MODE);

    // working well
    config.i2s_format = I2S_STD_FORMAT;
    config.sample_rate = 44100;  // INMP441 supports up to 44.1kHz
    config.channels = 1;         // INMP441 is mono
    config.bits_per_sample = 16; // INMP441 is a 24-bit ADC

    config.pin_ws = 19; // Adjust these pins according to your wiring
    config.pin_bck = 18;
    config.pin_data = 21;
    config.use_apll = true; // Try with APLL for better clock stability
    i2sStream.begin(config);
    Serial.println("I2S started");

    // start data sink
    server.begin(i2sStream, config, &filler);

// Arduino loop void loop() { // Handle new connections server.copy(); }

```

This code just listens to audio you record on a microphone (INMP441 MEMS microphone used here) and streams it to an endpoint of the microcontroller's IP address. If you would like more help on this give me a shout anytime. my email: akash at starmoon dot app

Hi, you can check out this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq2FRv0lCPw. I think it might be useful to you

I swear, every last bit of exchange from the "project developers" in this comment section, and all of the project repo, including the readme, is LLM-generated.

thanks for your words of encouragement!

> A lot of the subscription based pull ins could be replaced by networking into a machine running whisper/ollama etc anyway.

could you clarify this point? I think local LLMs are great for us to reduce cost and improve privacy concerns. For conversational AI however, is there a better way to run STT and TTS models?

Yes, it will refuse, because it uses openAI for the model.

The interesting thing to do with this project would be to fork it and run it with open inference models.

…buuuuuut, this is one of those “modern” web apps that has a dozen third party api dependencies to worry about, built on non-self-hostable platform (superbase) so even if you wanted to, it’s probably actually impossible to run in an isolated sandbox you completely control.

/shrug

For sure we are getting toys like that by next xmass. I legit going into my parts bin to see if I can wipe something up to stick in a teddy bear right now... Might not have movement, but a talking teddy bear is fun little project.

I have yet to watch AI (2001). I was very inspired by asimov's book the positronic man where the main family robot Andrew NDR has a positronic brain and finds himself "feeling" human emotions.

For our device currently, conversational audio is only used by the LLM when a button is pressed like a "push-to-talk" feature. In the future we want to either make it a capacitive touch sensor or listen for a wake word, like "Hi starmoon". I think it would be awesome to actually have models be running locally. And we don't have to have any conversation data stored in our db.

But I agree with your thought, I think this is a big fear with google home and alexa as well. ie. Are home automation tools always listening to our conversations. IIRC pre-wake word detection, none of the audio recorded is used to market products to you.

Dean I think that's important feedback. It's important for us to be platform agnostic. Like Junru stated, we are supporting ESP32 models: WROOM/WROVER and S3. But down the line would like to support rasp pi 4B, 5, zero etc.

Would you like to try building it with our devkit? We will prioritize raspberry pi firmware support if there is enough demand around this.

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.

Oh I see that. what inspection scenario you are thinking of? Have you faced something similar as the inspector and needed structured data immediately?

Thanks for asking. We will launch local LLM, STT, and TTS models in the near future versions.

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

[1] https://lmstudio.ai/

I think I heard this on a joe rogan podcast. Will add this to our roadmap along with DMT as an alternative.