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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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gyomu ◴[14 Oct 25 02:47 UTC] No.45575739[source]▶
This is why everyone not in technology hates us.

I'm a technologist. I get it, on some level it's kinda cool that we have the technology to bring this thing into the world, and so of course one wants to build it and make it real.

Breadboarding it as a fun weekend project is one thing. But making it exist as a product sold on Walmart.com is another.

What is the point, exactly? I mean this as a serious question to think about, not as a blanket dismissal. Any object, by the mere fact that it exists, demands something from the people it is put in contact with. What behaviors does it encourage, what beliefs does it promote, what skills does it exercise?

If I spend 60 minutes with my kids writing a physical letter to Santa, then going out and putting it in a mailbox, I have a fair sense of the answers to the questions above, and whether those answers are things I want to encourage or not.

If they spend 60 minutes interacting with this object, I'm not so sure I feel so confident about the answers.

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LarsDu88 ◴[14 Oct 25 02:58 UTC] No.45575791[source]▶
That's feels like such a luddite take. 50 years from now AI powered toys will be so ubiquitous and common to people, they will barely blink.

Just imagine how people must've failed against the first electronic toys 80 years ago, or Pokémon 30 years ago. Ask yourself... if this makes you depressed, what exact kind of new technology would make you happy?

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constantcrying ◴[14 Oct 25 13:27 UTC] No.45579781[source]▶
My father put together Legos as a child, as did I and as will my children. Toys do not exist to satisfy some inherent agenda of technological progress, they exist to entertain children. Why you think we would need a LLM for that is baffling.
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1. kwindla ◴[14 Oct 25 23:16 UTC] No.45586138{3}[source]▶
I honestly can't tell if this is trolling. LEGO bricks are pretty new technology, in the scheme of things. The original LEGO company "binding brick" was created in the late 1940s.

Of course you don't "need" an LLM to have a great toy. You also don't "need" injection-molded plastic. But if you have access to one or both, that can be pretty great!

Source: I wrote the spec for the first version of the LEGO Mindstorms programming language. These days I build a lot of voice+LLM stuff, some of it for big companies, some of it for myself and my kid.