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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: 0.417s | 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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fathermarz ◴[14 Oct 25 13:31 UTC] No.45579821[source]▶
This post is eliciting different feelings for me.

1. Congratulations on getting a product into a major chain’s distribution network. That is a feat and is something to be proud of.

2. Do I think this product should exist? No. There are services that do this already, the only thing different is making it standalone. I fear it’s just another toy that will sit on the shelf and eventually contribute to the e-waste problem.

3. The capitalist in me thinks I would have also done subscriptions and “buy more minutes”, but in practice I don’t think I would have been able to execute on that.

4. Confusing to see a “build your own” in the same breathe. Are you a part of the Mr. Christmas team that built this? Or just contracted to build it based on your experience in hardware?

5. Were you really hooked? Hooked on the technology stack? Or hooked talking to Santa? Do you have kids that you built it for?

Many thoughts rattle around in my head on this one.

replies(1): >>45581235 #
1. Sean-Der ◴[14 Oct 25 15:30 UTC] No.45581235[source]▶
1.) Not something I did. I only worked on the software.

4.) Contracted because I wrote the Open Source libraries it uses. I created https://github.com/pion/webrtc and https://webrtcforthecurious.com the company reached out to me because https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer didn't work with Pion. Turned out to be a libpeer bug (which I fixed)

> were you really hooked

I have been doing hardware + WebRTC with lots of different projects since then. https://www.youtube.com/@seandubois86 unpaid, that's my proof at least :)

> Hooked on the technology stack.

Yes I enjoy doing WebRTC + C https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr... (one of original authors) so I enjoy the tech a lot.

> Hooked talking to Santa

I enjoy the unexpected behaviors of Voice AI at this moment in time. In the video I asked Santa about pi, and it responded in a way I didn't expect. I find it absurd/entertaining.

> Do you have kids that you built it for

Yes. I have a few toys/personalities that I built for my kid. They make up funny scenarios/personalities and I change the prompt and put it in a different toy. It's fun.

replies(1): >>45635896 #
2. fathermarz ◴[19 Oct 25 17:15 UTC] No.45635896[source]▶
Excellent, thank you taking the time to respond. It makes sense now and is very clear. Great work!