When someone figures this out, it's going to be a multi billion dollar company, but the safety concerns for actually putting something like this into the hands of children are unbelievable.
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This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly.
I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI speech to speech service. While there are several useful Text-To-Speech (TTS) and Speech-To-Text (STT) repos out there, I believe none gets Speech-To-Speech right. OpenAI launched an embedded-repo late last year which sets up WebRTC with ESP-IDF. However, it's not beginner friendly and doesn't have a server side component for business logic.
This repo is an attempt at solving the above pains and creating a great speech to speech experience on Arduino with Secure Websockets using Edge Servers (with Deno/Supabase Edge Functions) for fast global connectivity and low latency.
IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.
Essentially, telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship? Or is there some other fear, like the AI will get compromised by a pedo and he'll talk your kid into who knows what? Or similar for "fill in state actor" using mind control on your kid (which, honestly, I feel like is normalized even for adults; eg. Fox News, etc., again US-centric)
I mean, that's not a silly fear. But perhaps you don't have any children? "Typical parental censorship" doesn't mean prudish pearl-clutching.
I have an autistic child who already struggles to be appropriate with things like personal space and boundaries -- giving him an early "birds and bees talk" could at minimum result in him doing and saying things that could cause severe trauma to his peers. And while he uses less self-control than a typical kid, even "completely normal" kids shouldn't be robbed of their innocence and forced to confront every adult subject until they're mature enough to handle it. There's a reason why content ratings exist.
Explaining difficult subjects to children, such as the Holocaust, sexual assault, etc. is very difficult to do in a way that doesn't leave them scarred, fearful, or worse, end up warping their own moral development so that they identify with the bad actors.
> telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship
Does AI today reliably respond with "the truth"? There are countless documented incidents of even full-grown, extremely well-educated adults (e.g. lawyers) believing well-phased hallucinations. Kids, and particularly small kids who haven't yet had much education about critical thinking and what to believe, have no chance. Conversational AI today isn't an uncensured search engine into a set of well-reasoned facts, it's an algorithm constructing a response based on what it's learned people on the internet want to hear, with no real concept of what's right or wrong, or a foundational set of knowledge about the world to contrast with and validate against.
> what exactly is the fear
Being fed reliable-sounding misinformation is one. Another is being used for emotional support (which kids do even with non-talking stuffed animals), when the AI has no real concept of how to emotionally support a kid and could just as easily do the opposite. I guess overall, the concern is having a kid spend a large amount of time talking to "someone" who sounds very convincing, has no real sense of morality or truth, and can potentially distort their world view in negative ways.
And yea, there's also exposing kids to subjects they're in no way equipped to handle yet, or encouraging them to do something that would result in harm to themselves or to others. Kids are very suggestible, and it takes a long while for them to develop a real understanding of the consequences of their actions.
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/10/nx-s1-5222574/kids-character-...
https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-a...
I think my theory is kind of correct, people generally 'trust' a YouTube censor but an AI censor is currently seen as untrusted boogeyman territory.
I have a 6 year old FWIW, I'm not some childless ignoramus I just do my risk calcs differently and view it as my job to oversee their use of a device like this. I wouldn't fear it outright because of what could happen. If I took that stance, my kid would never have any experiences at all.
Can't play baseball, I read a story where kid got hit by a bat. Can't travel to Mexico, cartels are in the news again. Home school it is, because shootings. And so on.
When it comes to privacy policies and ToS, I think a 6yo is reading into it just as much as their parent does. And by that I mean just looking for the [Agree] button.