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).

Therapists are some of the lowest IQ people and they’re also mostly going to therapists themselves because they have problems of their own. Last person you should get advice from is someone who can’t sort out their own life.

Like trying to learn to swim from a guy who’d drown in a water bottle.

Better a machine than a broken human. By the end of our generation, this overuse of 24 year olds with behavioral problems as diagnosticians will end.

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.

>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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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/