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Show HN: AI toy I worked on is in stores

(www.walmart.com)
156 points Sean-Der | 2 comments | 12 Oct 25 14:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.41s | source

Alt 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.

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andrepd ◴[13 Oct 25 23:31 UTC] No.45574474[source]▶
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!

replies(3): >>45574513 #>>45574518 #>>45575499 #
1. bragr ◴[13 Oct 25 23:37 UTC] No.45574513[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>45577598 #
2. grues-dinner ◴[14 Oct 25 08:31 UTC] No.45577598[source]▶
> tell them that lowly paid actor is _really_ Santa and he _really_ wants to hear what they want

To be fair, that is also pretty wild to me.