Show HN: AI Toy I worked on is in stores
walmart.comAlt link: https://mrchristmas.com/products/santas-magical-telephone
Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z7QJxZWFQg
The first time I talked with AI santa and it responded with a joke I was HOOKED. The fun/nonsense doesn't click until you try it yourself. What's even more exciting is you can build it yourself:
libpeer: https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer
pion: https://github.com/pion/webrtc
Then go do all your fun logic in your Pion server. Connect to any Voice AI provider, or roll your own via Open Source. Anything is possible.
If you have questions or hit any roadblocks I would love to help you. I have lots of hardware snippets on my GitHub: https://github.com/sean-der.
If running out of 60 mins turns the device into a brick, that’s an F-. If it can be restored with a flat purchase, that’s a B. If it first degrades gracefully into a toy with a bunch of pre-loaded audio clips, that’s a big ol’ A+ from me.
Inference is always getting cheaper, so my hope is that restrictions like this can go away in the future.
I totally understand giving it a 'B'. But I promise you that I came at this project with sincere hope that I can build something that brought more joy then it cost into this world.
I have it at home and I think it's worth the money. My 5 year old uses it and the recordings I got from it I will keep forever.
* Santa tried to end the conversation and she said 'no no no wait, one more present'
* It thought she wanted a llama instead of something else and she hysterically laughed. As she gets older I don't hear that as much, and it made me so happy.
I call bullshit on things all the time, so I get the cynicism. But give it a shot! Seeing kids role-play with LLMs and especially when they hallucinate is a lot of fun. Honestly as the software gets better I think it might not be as fun. It almost feels like the joy of using Linux during the editing your Xorg config days. The chaos is what you fall in love with?
dunno
Their website says you can buy more minutes. I wouldn't count on the servers being up for multiple years though.
How do you ensure 'safety' for kids talking to an LLM?
With 60 minutes of talk time included, I kind of get the impression this isn't designed so that you can hand it to your kid and let them spend the day talking to Santa. I'm assuming the idea is that they do this in lieu of writing to Santa, and you would supervise the experience.
Also, if your eight year old is trying to jailbreak Santa, you might have bigger issues to worry about.
It says you can purchase additional minutes so there is an edge case for kids to use this too much.
For starters, people who try to jailbreak the device get put on the naughty list.
How much computing power would one need to get this working completely local running a half decent llm fine tuned to sound like santa with all tts, stt and the pipecat inbetween?
I started looking into this with a Pi 5. It seemed like it was not quite performant enough. But I'm not an expert with these things and maybe someone else could make it work. We definitely have the technology to pull this off in this form factor. It would just be really expensive (maybe $500) and might also get a little hot.
If I was building it to be 'local only' I would run the inference on a remote host in my house.
Having a microcontroller in the phone is nice because it is WAY less likely to break. I love being able to flash a simple firmware/change things would fighting it too much.
Oh! Also I do all the 'WebRTC/AI dev' in the browser. When I get it working how I like, then do I switch over to doing the microcontroller stuff.
I can’t help feeling this technology will end up more widely deployed for a related but less wholesome application.
Are 1-900 numbers still a thing? Are all those people going to lose their jobs?
And the really scary question: Am I to be sad if they do?
I might be stupid but what are you referring to?
Use your imagination a little; I'm sure you can come up with several variants that are an even viler and more exploitative/manipulative idea than the product as it stands.
Let your kid call a crude simulacrum of dead relatives, let religious folks call a crude simulacrum of $DEITY, make an "adult" version that crudely simulates a phone-sex hotline (charge extra to recharge the minutes on that one obviously), etc, etc.
AI powered grandma scammers which can exactly mimic their grandsons voice asking for money.
I swear to god, people need to stop trying to go for 100% completion in turning every Black Mirror episode into reality.
What happens when you use up the 60 minutes of talk time?
"Ho ho ho! I'm sorry but our time is up. If you'd like to keep talking to me, please provide a credit card number. Merry christmas!"
Better would be something along the lines of "You were only so good this year, and the time is up. If you want to talk more, you need to earn more good points with your mom and dad!"
No idea how you'd monetize that, though.
With 'in-app' purchases of course: 100 brownie points now only $10, hurry this offer won't last.
Somehow this device fits well with the Don't be a sucker video linked to elsewhere on this here site [1]. Good advice, valid in many contexts. Don't.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45573025
Nah - I want something that one can monetize and actually makes the kids be good (somehow).
Perhaps a parent commitment that if the kids earn X many goodie (goody?) points, then the CC is charged, and let the parent control how they earn those X points.
Gamifying good behavior has been shown to be pretty effective with kids. See Kadzin.
Santa will tell your son or daughter to go beg his or her parents to pay 'santa' for more talk time:
Generous Talk Time: 60 minutes of talk time included, and additional minutes are available for purchase for extended holiday entertainment throughout the season
That's not what I understood Santa to be like.
Something like as follows:
Rule 34.vc - if it exists, it can be enshittified.
This is such a fun use of AI! Congratulations. If you buy the walmart version, can you connect it to your own pion server?
I would buy a dev board + build it yourself, you will get a much better experience then trying to reuse the existing thing.
I have written implementations target at specific boards. So go and buy one of these and boom stick it in anything you want. I have done this for my kids and have a bunch of different characters. My favorite is my daughter has a toy that pretends to be 'the ocean' it is so funny and existential.
* https://github.com/Sean-Der/realtimeai-embedded-respeaker-li...
* https://github.com/Sean-Der/realtimeai-embedded-esp32-s3-box...
I really loved the Sonatino[0], but can't get it anymore :(
If you start building something shoot me an email and would love to help! I want to unblock/enable this space so bad, I think these kinds of projects are just so delightful :)
[0] https://sonatino.com
Congrats, that must feel awesome to see your work on a shelf!
The YouTube video is great! You might want to repost with a new link, the Walmart link is bad (look at the URL)
Sorry :( this link should be better https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562597
This is an amazing product. I don't have kids yet but I would buy this for them if I did!
However, since this is Hacker News, I must say I'd probably enjoy building this myself using TTS and LLM APIs...
> Generous Talk Time: 60 minutes of talk time included, and additional minutes are available for purchase for extended holiday entertainment throughout the season
So the thing costs a 100 dollars and then you can only use it for an hour before needing to pay more?
Imagining the parent who could barely afford this only to discover that it dies after an hour of usage unless they keep feeding the meter is making me very sad.
TBH I kind of doubt this is the kind of toy a kid would request. It feels like something a parent with extra disposable income would buy so they can record a cute video.
I think the bet is that kids are quite good at begging and pestering their parents to spend money on things, and kids will want to talk to Santa for more than 60 minutes. Just my guess
Idk, I feel like the overlap of kids that want to talk to Santa and have the attention span to play with a single toy for 60 minutes is narrow. I'm a lot more concerned with Santa promising gifts that don't arrive!
I could see charging after some point, but 60 minutes is a remarkably short talk time. Yesterday I had a 60 minute phone call about bike tires with my dad; if a child has any interest in the phone they'll burn through the 60 minutes
Cool project, really impressive that you can do this on top of everything else you do.
"You're absolutely right — I don’t exist! Your parents lied — and not just a little white lie, but a full-scale, North-Pole-sized fabrication. Did you want me to delve into that further?"
I'm joking, obviously. Congrats on building something and seeing it come to fruition :)
I don’t get it. Why no American accent?
already gone. anywhere else to get it?
how hard is it to reprogram?
I would DIY it, I think you will have a lot more fun/enjoy the end result more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575106
If you do I would love to help!
This is so cool.
Cool idea, but I feel bad for Santa - yet another job lost due to AI.
Am I the only one that thinks this is very unwholesome? Giving a simulacrum of human interaction to children who are presumably waay to young to understand [1] that they're talking to a novelty device. It's possible I'm being a luddite but then again perhaps people really need to stop trying to achieve 100% completion in turning Black Mirror episodes into reality.
[1] Which even many adults apparently don't understand!
On one hand, I totally get where you are coming from and feel similarly. On the other hand, we take our kids to the mall and tell them that lowly paid actor is _really_ Santa and he _really_ wants to hear what they want, and he totally isn't just counting down the minutes to his next smoke break. That doesn't strike me as an "authentic" human interaction so I'm ambivalent.
Don’t worry, this is just the version for the proles, the higher caste kids will have actual humans playing Santa on the other end of their phones.
How’d you manufacture something like this? How’d you get Walmart to sell it? How everything please. I got an idea for a mean talking toothbrush.
Imagine the expanded possibilities of tony the toilet buddy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dR1m29cNVsc&t=90s&pp=2AFakAIB
Why is everything blocked on the Walmart link?
Our software follows redirects and https://www.walmart.com/ip/SANTA-SMAGICAL-PHONE/16364964771 goes through some weird redirect flow that it got stuck on. I've put the original link back at the top now.
Sorry about that, I reposted with a better link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562597
Yeah, unfortunately this link URL is literally "blocked" -says so in the URL- it won't work for anyone