I'm surprised by the overwhelming positive vibes in the comments here.
Maybe I'm alone? To me, this comes across as extremely creepy, the exact opposite of what we should desire from AI in products aimed at children.
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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.
Maybe I'm alone? To me, this comes across as extremely creepy, the exact opposite of what we should desire from AI in products aimed at children.
The target audience is young kids who are still developing socialization skills. This toy off-boards that development from a human to an AI. We don't really know how that affects a kid.
This also plausibly trains the kid to think of other people as AIs: subservient tools that exist primarily to respond to them. Not exactly a healthy attitude to take towards one's peers.
It's presumably also going to get a lot of unsupervised usage, and the occasional AI model updates. What happens when a bad model update has it advising kids that soap is a forbidden candy that tastes delicious?
(I'm not saying any of these is particularly likely, just trying to share the sort of concerns that would lead someone to feeling creeped out)