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Show HN: AI toy I worked on is in stores

(www.walmart.com)
156 points Sean-Der | 1 comments | 12 Oct 25 14:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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Waterluvian ◴[13 Oct 25 23:35 UTC] No.45574500[source]▶
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.
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Sean-Der ◴[14 Oct 25 01:15 UTC] No.45575175[source]▶
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

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koakuma-chan ◴[14 Oct 25 04:19 UTC] No.45576221[source]▶
> Seeing kids role-play with LLMs and especially when they hallucinate is a lot of fun.

I think this is kinda fucked up

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Sean-Der ◴[14 Oct 25 13:27 UTC] No.45579776[source]▶
Why? It’s probably just speech to text failing.

It reminds me of using early Windows. The unexpected behaviors of the software was what was fun.

Maybe not something everyone finds enjoyable.

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1. koakuma-chan ◴[14 Oct 25 15:52 UTC] No.45581503{3}[source]▶
It's not about the hallucination part.