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Show HN: I open-sourced my AI toy company that runs on ESP32 and OpenAI realtime

177 points by akadeb 1y ago

Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. 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.

deleted 1y ago
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ForHackernews 1y ago
This is a cool demo but I would not let my child play with anything that talks to a cloud AI like this. Furby fever dreams made real.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- akadeb 1y ago
  I understand, is it the realtime conversational aspect or just in general you wouldn't want a child to play with a TTS-like service?
mcdow 1y ago
Dude this is super cool! What made you decide to open source it? I had a similar idea that I never followed through with(even down to using an ESP). Basically you could make a Harry Potter talking painting with basically your device + an e-ink display that displays some 3D modeled character. For others, here’s a direct link to a demo video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o1eIAwVll5I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o1eIAwVll5I
- Sean-Der 1y ago
  I get a `Request has expired` could you upload somewhere else?
  - mcdow 1y ago
    My bad! Updated the link.
- magixx 1y ago
  I also thought about this but wanted to look into an ESP32 CAM to get vision working. For better or worse I didn't pursue the idea as I thought in the end repurposing a cell phone would be better overall. I do wonder if the cellphone/app argument is why we didn't see that many hardware LLM API wrappers up until now. The rabbit R1 was basically just that. I've seen more products in this space recently such as Ropet[1], LOOI[2], and others but for now it's going to be costly for companies to sell such a product at a fixed cost as I think a subscription model would be a hard sell [3] for consumers. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1067657324/ropet-your-next-generation-ai-robot-pet https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1067657324/ropet-your-n... [2] https://looirobot.com/products/looi-robot?variant=49092007624917 https://looirobot.com/products/looi-robot?variant=4909200762... [3] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/tragic-robot-shutdown-shows-why-220015382.html https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/tragic-robot-shutdown-sho...
Sean-Der 1y ago
This is wonderful, really great job on this! For me physical devices is when it really starts to feel magical. My pre-schooler never engaged with Speech-to-Speech examples I showed her on a screen. However, when I showed her a reindeer toy[1] on my desk that tells joke that is when it became real. It is the same joy/wonder I felt playing Myst for the first time. ---- If anyone is trying to build physical devices with Realtime API I would love to help. I work at OpenAI on Realtime API and worked on [0] (was upstreamed) and I really believe in this space. I want to see this all built with Open/Interoperable standards so we don't have vendor lock-in and developers can build the best thing possible :) [0] https://github.com/openai/openai-realtime-embedded https://github.com/openai/openai-realtime-embedded [1] https://youtu.be/14leJ1fg4Pw?t=804 https://youtu.be/14leJ1fg4Pw?t=804
- StefMyb 1y ago
  I would love to chat further with you about this. I am working on building a educational conversational toy. The toy will tell stories and sing but the conversational aspect is the only thing at this stage that requires AI. The whole idea came from my daughter who was in Kinder at the time
  - Sean-Der 1y ago
    sean @ pion.ly please email me any time. Offer is open for anyone. If you need help with WebRTC/Realtime API/Embedded I am here to help. I have an open meeting link on my website.
empath75 1y ago
When someone figures this out, it's going to be a multi billion dollar company, but the safety concerns for actually putting something like this into the hands of children are unbelievable.
- georgemcbay 1y ago
  Reminds me of Conan O'Brien's old WikiBear skits https://youtu.be/0SfSx9ts46A https://youtu.be/0SfSx9ts46A
- mithr 1y ago
  This. The idea is super cool in theory! But given how these sort of things work today, having a toy that can have an independent conversation with a kid and that, despite the best intentions of the prompt writer, isn't guaranteed to stay within its "sandbox", is terrifying enough to probably not be worth the risk. IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.
  - conductr 1y ago
    I'm trying to use my imagination, but what exactly is the fear? Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar? Or, for us in US, maybe it tells your kid they should wear a bullet proof vest to pre-K instead of bringing a stuffy for naptime? Essentially, telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship? Or is there some other fear, like the AI will get compromised by a pedo and he'll talk your kid into who knows what? Or similar for "fill in state actor" using mind control on your kid (which, honestly, I feel like is normalized even for adults; eg. Fox News, etc., again US-centric)
    - xp84 1y ago
      > Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar? I mean, that's not a silly fear. But perhaps you don't have any children? "Typical parental censorship" doesn't mean prudish pearl-clutching. I have an autistic child who already struggles to be appropriate with things like personal space and boundaries -- giving him an early "birds and bees talk" could at minimum result in him doing and saying things that could cause severe trauma to his peers. And while he uses less self-control than a typical kid, even "completely normal" kids shouldn't be robbed of their innocence and forced to confront every adult subject until they're mature enough to handle it. There's a reason why content ratings exist. Explaining difficult subjects to children, such as the Holocaust, sexual assault, etc. is very difficult to do in a way that doesn't leave them scarred, fearful, or worse, end up warping their own moral development so that they identify with the bad actors.
vunderba 1y ago
I remember when LLMs started getting mass traction and the first thing everyone wanted to build was AG Talking Bear + ChatGPT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AG_Bear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AG_Bear With regard to this project, using an ESP32 makes a lot of sense, I used an Espressif ESP32-S3 Box to build a smart speaker along with the Willow inference server and it worked very well. The ESP speech recognition framework helps with wake word / far field audio processing.
- akadeb 1y ago
  The willow team has iterated fast. I think ESP-IDF is more advanced and using Arduino makes it easier for people to jump on and tinker with Speech-to-Speech AI which is why i created this repo
hakaneskici 1y ago
Amazing, thank you for sharing. I'm interested in learning about your experience while building this :) What kind of interesting challenges have you run into, and how have your work influenced the OpenAI's realtime API? PS: Your github readme is quite well crafted, nowadays hard to come across.
- reolbox 1y ago
  This is an AI reply.
  - hakaneskici 1y ago
    What made you think that?
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      The README seems like what GPT would spit out, with all the emojis, diagrams, etc. Not the first time I ran into it, but I did not bother commenting. I can recognize it from far away. Thankfully I am not the only one.
      - hakaneskici 1y ago
        I misunderstood the parent comment as if it was saying my post was AI ;) I think the readme is still well crafted, AI couldn't do this without the author.
        johnisgood 1y ago
        A combination of LLM and author. That is not to say it is bad or negative, to be honest, so yeah you are right. If he meant your reply, I do not see any reasons as to why. :D
      - akadeb 1y ago
        The emojis are all AI. The content is a mix of me n cursor and I added the mermaid chart to make it easier to visualize the system diagram. The circuit diagram in on figma And demo video edited on capcut
drakenot 1y ago
Something that really kills the 'effect' of most of the Voice > AI demos that I see is the cold start / latency. The OpenAI "Voice Mode" is closer, but when we can have near instantaneous and natural back and forth voice mode, that will be a big in terms of it feeling magical. Today, it is say something, awkwardly wait N seconds then listen to the reply and sometimes awkwardly interrupt it. Even if the models were no smarter than they are today, if we could crack that "conversational" piece and performance piece, it would be a big difference in my opinion.
- Sean-Der 1y ago
  I think it will always feel unnatural as long as 'AI Speech' is turn based. Right now developers used Voice Activity Detection to detect when the user has stopped talking. What would be REALLY cool is if we had something that would interrupt you during conversation like talking with a real human.
  - conductr 1y ago
    I can see how interruptions would prove even more unnatural and annoying pretty quick. There's a lot of nuance in knowing how to interrupt properly and often, people that interrupt only do so quickly, then yield, allow person to finish then resume - very situational and tons of nuance. Otherwise, with current level of sophistication, you'd just have the AI talking over you the entire time, not allowing you to complete your thoughts/questions/commands/etc and people would quickly be more frustrated and just turn it off.
    - mst 1y ago
      I absolutely agree with your analysis wrt current tech - however, I suspect the person you're replying to is talking about "what would be really cool" in terms of it happening in a future where the relevant underpinnings had advanced to the point where it could actually manage the situational/nuance stuff properly. I almost certainly wouldn't want to use something that tried to implement it now but it's a lovely dream and the state of the art keeps advancing at quite the speed (i.e. faster than I would have predicted, even when I do my best to take into account that it keeps advancing faster than I would have predicted ;).
deepcurryshit 1y ago
[flagged]
behnamoh 1y ago
am I the only one who finds the unnecessarily positive vibes of OpenAI realtime voices unrealistic, too much, and borderline creepy?
- mickael-kerjean 1y ago
  Yep and having it in a child toy is way beyond the border of creepy
  - 3np 1y ago
    Moreso from the consent- and privacy angle.
  - akadeb 1y ago
    Currently our device is a toy accessory. And for children we are strictly focusing on `Story mode`. Where adventure stories / fairy tales feel more engaging. I think there's value in getting the AI to create epic stories consistently
- bethekidyouwant 1y ago
  [flagged]
- scyzoryk_xyz 1y ago
  You’re not the only one, same here. I believe there will be interest in extracting insights from speech-related fields, performing arts etc. Kind of how there was this transfer of design principles in the 90’s-00’s from traditional typographers, letterform revivals, print techniques. It’ll be interesting to see an evolution of expectations and culture emerge around AI voices depending on role. Maybe we’ll see these positive voice vibes as silly and naive the same way we see MySpace aesthetics today?
- mst 1y ago
  OpenAI stuff in general seems (to me, at least) to be overly positive and confident in terms of how it replies. While I make no foolish claims that it's perfect, I've found Claude feels much less arrogant, and was genuinely appreciative when one of its replies started with an (accurate, of course I checked primary sources to verify that) analysis of the first half of my question, and then for the more obscure second half said "I'm not sure if I can answer that without hallucinating, but here's some stuff you could try researching." Certainly Claude's tone and "attitude" (FSVO) works much better for me than any other LLM I've tried, though mileage will, of course, vary. (I have zero connection to the company and am still on a free account, I'm just quietly impressed relative to the competition)
justanotheratom 1y ago
This is quite cool. Two questions: - why do you need nextjs frontend for what looks like a headless use case? - how much would be the OpenAI bill if there is 15 minutes of usage per day?
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  And I am wondering, why use an ESP32 if you don't need the WiFi? (And, please, no WiFi in a toy!)
  - akadeb 1y ago
    Currently we connect to a Wifi network to reach the Deno edge server. Some popular toys doing it: Yoto, Toniebox
- irq-1 1y ago
  > This equates to approximately $0.06 per minute of audio input and $0.24 per minute of audio output. https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-realtime-api/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-realtime-api/ About the nextjs site, I was thinking maybe its difficult to have supabase hold long connections, or route the response? I'm curious too.
  - akadeb 1y ago
    The long connections are ultimately handled by Deno Edge so the site isn't used there. The NextJS frontend (which also could be an iOS/Android app) helps provide an interface to select character, create AI characters, set ESP32 volume, and view conversation history.
- akadeb 1y ago
  thank you! The nextjs frontend is to set things like device volume, selecting which character you are interacting with, viewing conversation history etc. I just tried it and for a 15 minute chat, it's roughly 20c. Roughly 570 input tokens
supermatt 1y ago
This looks like so much fun! I have recently gotten into working with electronics, so it seems like a nice little project to undertake. I noticed that it is dependent on openAIs realtime API, so it got me wondering what open alternatives there are as I would love a more realtime alexa-like device in my home that doesnt contact the cloud. I have only played with software, but the existing solutions have never felt realtime to me. I could only find <https://github.com/fixie-ai/ultravox https://github.com/fixie-ai/ultravox> that would seem to really work as realtime. It seems to be some model that wires up llama and whisper somehow, rather than treating them as separate steps which is common with other projects. What other options are available for this kind of real-time behaviour?
- 3D30497420 1y ago
  Maybe inspiration from how Home Assistant can do local speech-to-text and vice versa? https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_loc... Pretty sure you'd need to host this on something more robust than an ESP32 though.
  - supermatt 1y ago
    Yeah, I was looking at home assistant as well, but it doesnt feel real-time, likely due to it having the transcription stage separate from the inference.
- _neil 1y ago
  Not on-device but for local network I’ve been looking at Speaches[0]. Haven’t tried it yet, but I have been running kokoru-web[1] and the quality and speed is really good. [0] https://speaches.ai/ https://speaches.ai/ [1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/kokoro-web https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/kokoro-web
- Sean-Der 1y ago
  My plan is that Espressif’s WebRTC code[0] will hook up to pipe at [1] that gets you the freedom to do whatever you want. The design of OpenAI + WebRTC was to lean on WebRTC as much as possible to make it easier for users. [0] https://github.com/espressif/esp-webrtc-solution https://github.com/espressif/esp-webrtc-solution [1] https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat
hoppp 1y ago
Its great.lovely. but on the long run these toys rely on subscription payment? Both the supabase Api and OpenAI billing is per api call. So the lovely talking toys can die if the company stops being profitable. I would love to see a version with decent hardware that runs a local model, that could have a long lifespan and work offline.
- xp84 1y ago
  > lovely talking toys can die if the company stops being profitable. This is a good point to me as a parent -- in a world where this becomes a precious toy, it would be a serious risk of emotional pain if the child experienced this scenario like the death of a pet or friend. > version with decent hardware that runs a local model I feel like something small and efficient enough to meet that (today) would be dumb as a post. Like Siri-level dumb. Personally, I'd prefer a toy which was tethered to a home device. Without a cloud (and thus commercial) dependency, the toy wouldn't be 'smart' outside of Wi-fi range, but I'd design it so that it got 'sleepy' when away from Wi-fi, able to be "woken up" and, in that state, to respond to a few phrases with canned, Siri-like answers. Perhaps new content could be made up for it daily and downloaded to local storage while at home, so that it could still "tell me a story" offline etc.
  - scottmcf 1y ago
    > This is a good point to me as a parent -- in a world where this becomes a precious toy, it would be a serious risk of emotional pain if the child experienced this scenario like the death of a pet or friend. We've already seen this exact scenario play out with "Moxie" a few months ago: https://www.axios.com/2024/12/10/moxie-kids-robot-shuts-down https://www.axios.com/2024/12/10/moxie-kids-robot-shuts-down
- zild3d 1y ago
  well for now its either small device that uses APIs or Paddington Bear needs a backpack for his GPU
tantalor 1y ago
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.
- behnamoh 1y ago
  Exactly my thoughts when I first saw the comments!
- akadeb 1y ago
  For parents we added a `Story mode` option (similar to Yoto toy / Toniebox). The idea is: the AI crafts a story and invites the child to craft the story together in a more engaging way. The story prompt keeps the story focused and in scope.
- adregan 1y ago
  Totally get the creepy part, but my criticism of devices like this is that they seem to be made by people with limited exposure to the creative power of children. Children don’t need this; they are so much more creative than an AI (and the adults that trained the AI), and their creativity is fueled by boredom.
  - dayvid 1y ago
    I mean when I was a kid I had action figures and played out scenarios. Would be pretty nuts if you could make your own TV shows with AIs assisting the play. Or set up your own battles, etc. Especially if it had more animatronic entry points
  - mst 1y ago
    I feel like it would be creepy if the kid was using it without anybody ever checking up on it ... but I think all of my friends with kids would say that the answer to that is "parenting." I mean, giving a kid an unlocked iPad and not bothering to do basic supervision can also have really creepy results, so I'm unconvinced that something like your work actually makes anything worse in the negligent parenting situation, and seems like it could be a lot of fun in the competent parenting one. If you haven't already done this, I'd note that I can think of a number of parents who would probably rather enjoy a version of story mode that let them collaborate with their child and your code to put together a bedtime story before they turn it off for the night and tuck the kid into bed.
ianbicking 1y ago
What's been your experience with the Realtime API? I've been doing LLM with voice, but haven't really given it a try – the price is so high, and it feels like it's much harder to control. Specifically that you just get one system prompt and then the model takes over entirely. (Though looking at the API, I see you can inject text and do some other things to play around with the session.)
- akadeb 1y ago
  I agree, it's still pricy. The cost works out better with `gpt-4o-mini-realtime-preview-2024-12-17`. Yep its constrained to the system prompt but I pass in conversation history with each new session to keep it relevant. It also supports tool calling which is clutch. Have you tried Hume AI? They've got a neat suite of APIs that give you more control on each session.
  - ianbicking 1y ago
    Hume has been on my radar for a long time, but I've never actually used their products. They keep coming out with new lines and yet I never see anyone talk about them... I'm not sure why? Though it's so hard to figure out their offerings, and some seem to actually be wrappers around other LLMs... Do you know what Hume's latency is like? The completely vertically integrated Realtime API is pretty compelling because of that latency, but it's not as clear to me how they would make that all work with their hybrid system.
wormlord 1y ago
What could go wrong?
- akadeb 1y ago
  Murphy's law
dayvid 1y ago
Really interesting. Also more powerful if integrated with animatronic movement. Reminds me of Furby. Doesn't even have to be full AI, just augmented with slightly smarter and more flexible capabilities
- akadeb 1y ago
  thanks David, let me know if you get a chance to try it out!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
stavros 1y ago
This is great, thank you! I can learn a lot from this.
- akadeb 1y ago
  thank you stavros!
andruby 1y ago
Really nice! Thank you for including a youtube video. It's a little unfortunate that you do time cuts between your "prompt" and the response. I'm curious if you were waiting 0.5s or 10s to get the response. I think the usability/fun of this stands or falls with that latency. Maybe it could be combined with fastvoiceagent.cerebrium.ai (discussed 10 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40805010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40805010) for lower latency
- akadeb 1y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I have attached the raw unedited video here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kEmbVInvUrYFwjddyGL8Rz03c0NWVmiy/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kEmbVInvUrYFwjddyGL8Rz03c0N... (sorry the video is a bit long ~5min with some intro about my company :-)
gbertb 1y ago
great stuff! thanks for sharing
- akadeb 1y ago
  thanks for checking it out Bert
airbreather 1y ago
Great, until built in ads become part of the tech...
- akadeb 1y ago
  Hi Mr. teddy bear! Hey there buddy! Have you tried brushing with Sensodyne now available at your nearest CVS only for $9.99!

177 points by akadeb 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ForHackernews 1y ago

This is a cool demo but I would not let my child play with anything that talks to a cloud AI like this. Furby fever dreams made real.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
akadeb 1y ago
I understand, is it the realtime conversational aspect or just in general you wouldn't want a child to play with a TTS-like service?

mcdow 1y ago

Dude this is super cool! What made you decide to open source it? I had a similar idea that I never followed through with(even down to using an ESP). Basically you could make a Harry Potter talking painting with basically your device + an e-ink display that displays some 3D modeled character. For others, here’s a direct link to a demo video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o1eIAwVll5I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o1eIAwVll5I

Sean-Der 1y ago
I get a `Request has expired` could you upload somewhere else?
- mcdow 1y ago
  My bad! Updated the link.
magixx 1y ago
I also thought about this but wanted to look into an ESP32 CAM to get vision working. For better or worse I didn't pursue the idea as I thought in the end repurposing a cell phone would be better overall. I do wonder if the cellphone/app argument is why we didn't see that many hardware LLM API wrappers up until now. The rabbit R1 was basically just that. I've seen more products in this space recently such as Ropet[1], LOOI[2], and others but for now it's going to be costly for companies to sell such a product at a fixed cost as I think a subscription model would be a hard sell [3] for consumers. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1067657324/ropet-your-next-generation-ai-robot-pet https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1067657324/ropet-your-n... [2] https://looirobot.com/products/looi-robot?variant=49092007624917 https://looirobot.com/products/looi-robot?variant=4909200762... [3] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/tragic-robot-shutdown-shows-why-220015382.html https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/tragic-robot-shutdown-sho...

Sean-Der 1y ago

This is wonderful, really great job on this! For me physical devices is when it really starts to feel magical. My pre-schooler never engaged with Speech-to-Speech examples I showed her on a screen. However, when I showed her a reindeer toy[1] on my desk that tells joke that is when it became real. It is the same joy/wonder I felt playing Myst for the first time. ---- If anyone is trying to build physical devices with Realtime API I would love to help. I work at OpenAI on Realtime API and worked on [0] (was upstreamed) and I really believe in this space. I want to see this all built with Open/Interoperable standards so we don't have vendor lock-in and developers can build the best thing possible :) [0] https://github.com/openai/openai-realtime-embedded https://github.com/openai/openai-realtime-embedded [1] https://youtu.be/14leJ1fg4Pw?t=804 https://youtu.be/14leJ1fg4Pw?t=804

StefMyb 1y ago
I would love to chat further with you about this. I am working on building a educational conversational toy. The toy will tell stories and sing but the conversational aspect is the only thing at this stage that requires AI. The whole idea came from my daughter who was in Kinder at the time
- Sean-Der 1y ago
  sean @ pion.ly please email me any time. Offer is open for anyone. If you need help with WebRTC/Realtime API/Embedded I am here to help. I have an open meeting link on my website.

empath75 1y ago

When someone figures this out, it's going to be a multi billion dollar company, but the safety concerns for actually putting something like this into the hands of children are unbelievable.

georgemcbay 1y ago
Reminds me of Conan O'Brien's old WikiBear skits https://youtu.be/0SfSx9ts46A https://youtu.be/0SfSx9ts46A
mithr 1y ago
This. The idea is super cool in theory! But given how these sort of things work today, having a toy that can have an independent conversation with a kid and that, despite the best intentions of the prompt writer, isn't guaranteed to stay within its "sandbox", is terrifying enough to probably not be worth the risk. IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.
- conductr 1y ago
  I'm trying to use my imagination, but what exactly is the fear? Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar? Or, for us in US, maybe it tells your kid they should wear a bullet proof vest to pre-K instead of bringing a stuffy for naptime? Essentially, telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship? Or is there some other fear, like the AI will get compromised by a pedo and he'll talk your kid into who knows what? Or similar for "fill in state actor" using mind control on your kid (which, honestly, I feel like is normalized even for adults; eg. Fox News, etc., again US-centric)
  - xp84 1y ago
    > Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar? I mean, that's not a silly fear. But perhaps you don't have any children? "Typical parental censorship" doesn't mean prudish pearl-clutching. I have an autistic child who already struggles to be appropriate with things like personal space and boundaries -- giving him an early "birds and bees talk" could at minimum result in him doing and saying things that could cause severe trauma to his peers. And while he uses less self-control than a typical kid, even "completely normal" kids shouldn't be robbed of their innocence and forced to confront every adult subject until they're mature enough to handle it. There's a reason why content ratings exist. Explaining difficult subjects to children, such as the Holocaust, sexual assault, etc. is very difficult to do in a way that doesn't leave them scarred, fearful, or worse, end up warping their own moral development so that they identify with the bad actors.

vunderba 1y ago

I remember when LLMs started getting mass traction and the first thing everyone wanted to build was AG Talking Bear + ChatGPT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AG_Bear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AG_Bear With regard to this project, using an ESP32 makes a lot of sense, I used an Espressif ESP32-S3 Box to build a smart speaker along with the Willow inference server and it worked very well. The ESP speech recognition framework helps with wake word / far field audio processing.

akadeb 1y ago
The willow team has iterated fast. I think ESP-IDF is more advanced and using Arduino makes it easier for people to jump on and tinker with Speech-to-Speech AI which is why i created this repo

hakaneskici 1y ago

Amazing, thank you for sharing. I'm interested in learning about your experience while building this :) What kind of interesting challenges have you run into, and how have your work influenced the OpenAI's realtime API? PS: Your github readme is quite well crafted, nowadays hard to come across.

reolbox 1y ago
This is an AI reply.
- hakaneskici 1y ago
  What made you think that?
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    The README seems like what GPT would spit out, with all the emojis, diagrams, etc. Not the first time I ran into it, but I did not bother commenting. I can recognize it from far away. Thankfully I am not the only one.
    - hakaneskici 1y ago
      I misunderstood the parent comment as if it was saying my post was AI ;) I think the readme is still well crafted, AI couldn't do this without the author.
      - johnisgood 1y ago
        A combination of LLM and author. That is not to say it is bad or negative, to be honest, so yeah you are right. If he meant your reply, I do not see any reasons as to why. :D
    - akadeb 1y ago
      The emojis are all AI. The content is a mix of me n cursor and I added the mermaid chart to make it easier to visualize the system diagram. The circuit diagram in on figma And demo video edited on capcut

drakenot 1y ago

Something that really kills the 'effect' of most of the Voice > AI demos that I see is the cold start / latency. The OpenAI "Voice Mode" is closer, but when we can have near instantaneous and natural back and forth voice mode, that will be a big in terms of it feeling magical. Today, it is say something, awkwardly wait N seconds then listen to the reply and sometimes awkwardly interrupt it. Even if the models were no smarter than they are today, if we could crack that "conversational" piece and performance piece, it would be a big difference in my opinion.

Sean-Der 1y ago
I think it will always feel unnatural as long as 'AI Speech' is turn based. Right now developers used Voice Activity Detection to detect when the user has stopped talking. What would be REALLY cool is if we had something that would interrupt you during conversation like talking with a real human.
- conductr 1y ago
  I can see how interruptions would prove even more unnatural and annoying pretty quick. There's a lot of nuance in knowing how to interrupt properly and often, people that interrupt only do so quickly, then yield, allow person to finish then resume - very situational and tons of nuance. Otherwise, with current level of sophistication, you'd just have the AI talking over you the entire time, not allowing you to complete your thoughts/questions/commands/etc and people would quickly be more frustrated and just turn it off.
  - mst 1y ago
    I absolutely agree with your analysis wrt current tech - however, I suspect the person you're replying to is talking about "what would be really cool" in terms of it happening in a future where the relevant underpinnings had advanced to the point where it could actually manage the situational/nuance stuff properly. I almost certainly wouldn't want to use something that tried to implement it now but it's a lovely dream and the state of the art keeps advancing at quite the speed (i.e. faster than I would have predicted, even when I do my best to take into account that it keeps advancing faster than I would have predicted ;).

deepcurryshit 1y ago

[flagged]

behnamoh 1y ago

am I the only one who finds the unnecessarily positive vibes of OpenAI realtime voices unrealistic, too much, and borderline creepy?

mickael-kerjean 1y ago
Yep and having it in a child toy is way beyond the border of creepy
- 3np 1y ago
  Moreso from the consent- and privacy angle.
- akadeb 1y ago
  Currently our device is a toy accessory. And for children we are strictly focusing on `Story mode`. Where adventure stories / fairy tales feel more engaging. I think there's value in getting the AI to create epic stories consistently
bethekidyouwant 1y ago
[flagged]
scyzoryk_xyz 1y ago
You’re not the only one, same here. I believe there will be interest in extracting insights from speech-related fields, performing arts etc. Kind of how there was this transfer of design principles in the 90’s-00’s from traditional typographers, letterform revivals, print techniques. It’ll be interesting to see an evolution of expectations and culture emerge around AI voices depending on role. Maybe we’ll see these positive voice vibes as silly and naive the same way we see MySpace aesthetics today?
mst 1y ago
OpenAI stuff in general seems (to me, at least) to be overly positive and confident in terms of how it replies. While I make no foolish claims that it's perfect, I've found Claude feels much less arrogant, and was genuinely appreciative when one of its replies started with an (accurate, of course I checked primary sources to verify that) analysis of the first half of my question, and then for the more obscure second half said "I'm not sure if I can answer that without hallucinating, but here's some stuff you could try researching." Certainly Claude's tone and "attitude" (FSVO) works much better for me than any other LLM I've tried, though mileage will, of course, vary. (I have zero connection to the company and am still on a free account, I'm just quietly impressed relative to the competition)

justanotheratom 1y ago

This is quite cool. Two questions: - why do you need nextjs frontend for what looks like a headless use case? - how much would be the OpenAI bill if there is 15 minutes of usage per day?

JKCalhoun 1y ago
And I am wondering, why use an ESP32 if you don't need the WiFi? (And, please, no WiFi in a toy!)
- akadeb 1y ago
  Currently we connect to a Wifi network to reach the Deno edge server. Some popular toys doing it: Yoto, Toniebox
irq-1 1y ago
> This equates to approximately $0.06 per minute of audio input and $0.24 per minute of audio output. https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-realtime-api/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-realtime-api/ About the nextjs site, I was thinking maybe its difficult to have supabase hold long connections, or route the response? I'm curious too.
- akadeb 1y ago
  The long connections are ultimately handled by Deno Edge so the site isn't used there. The NextJS frontend (which also could be an iOS/Android app) helps provide an interface to select character, create AI characters, set ESP32 volume, and view conversation history.
akadeb 1y ago
thank you! The nextjs frontend is to set things like device volume, selecting which character you are interacting with, viewing conversation history etc. I just tried it and for a 15 minute chat, it's roughly 20c. Roughly 570 input tokens

supermatt 1y ago

This looks like so much fun! I have recently gotten into working with electronics, so it seems like a nice little project to undertake. I noticed that it is dependent on openAIs realtime API, so it got me wondering what open alternatives there are as I would love a more realtime alexa-like device in my home that doesnt contact the cloud. I have only played with software, but the existing solutions have never felt realtime to me. I could only find <https://github.com/fixie-ai/ultravox https://github.com/fixie-ai/ultravox> that would seem to really work as realtime. It seems to be some model that wires up llama and whisper somehow, rather than treating them as separate steps which is common with other projects. What other options are available for this kind of real-time behaviour?

3D30497420 1y ago
Maybe inspiration from how Home Assistant can do local speech-to-text and vice versa? https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_loc... Pretty sure you'd need to host this on something more robust than an ESP32 though.
- supermatt 1y ago
  Yeah, I was looking at home assistant as well, but it doesnt feel real-time, likely due to it having the transcription stage separate from the inference.
_neil 1y ago
Not on-device but for local network I’ve been looking at Speaches[0]. Haven’t tried it yet, but I have been running kokoru-web[1] and the quality and speed is really good. [0] https://speaches.ai/ https://speaches.ai/ [1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/kokoro-web https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/kokoro-web
Sean-Der 1y ago
My plan is that Espressif’s WebRTC code[0] will hook up to pipe at [1] that gets you the freedom to do whatever you want. The design of OpenAI + WebRTC was to lean on WebRTC as much as possible to make it easier for users. [0] https://github.com/espressif/esp-webrtc-solution https://github.com/espressif/esp-webrtc-solution [1] https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat

hoppp 1y ago

Its great.lovely. but on the long run these toys rely on subscription payment? Both the supabase Api and OpenAI billing is per api call. So the lovely talking toys can die if the company stops being profitable. I would love to see a version with decent hardware that runs a local model, that could have a long lifespan and work offline.

xp84 1y ago
> lovely talking toys can die if the company stops being profitable. This is a good point to me as a parent -- in a world where this becomes a precious toy, it would be a serious risk of emotional pain if the child experienced this scenario like the death of a pet or friend. > version with decent hardware that runs a local model I feel like something small and efficient enough to meet that (today) would be dumb as a post. Like Siri-level dumb. Personally, I'd prefer a toy which was tethered to a home device. Without a cloud (and thus commercial) dependency, the toy wouldn't be 'smart' outside of Wi-fi range, but I'd design it so that it got 'sleepy' when away from Wi-fi, able to be "woken up" and, in that state, to respond to a few phrases with canned, Siri-like answers. Perhaps new content could be made up for it daily and downloaded to local storage while at home, so that it could still "tell me a story" offline etc.
- scottmcf 1y ago
  > This is a good point to me as a parent -- in a world where this becomes a precious toy, it would be a serious risk of emotional pain if the child experienced this scenario like the death of a pet or friend. We've already seen this exact scenario play out with "Moxie" a few months ago: https://www.axios.com/2024/12/10/moxie-kids-robot-shuts-down https://www.axios.com/2024/12/10/moxie-kids-robot-shuts-down
zild3d 1y ago
well for now its either small device that uses APIs or Paddington Bear needs a backpack for his GPU

tantalor 1y ago

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.

behnamoh 1y ago
Exactly my thoughts when I first saw the comments!
akadeb 1y ago
For parents we added a `Story mode` option (similar to Yoto toy / Toniebox). The idea is: the AI crafts a story and invites the child to craft the story together in a more engaging way. The story prompt keeps the story focused and in scope.
adregan 1y ago
Totally get the creepy part, but my criticism of devices like this is that they seem to be made by people with limited exposure to the creative power of children. Children don’t need this; they are so much more creative than an AI (and the adults that trained the AI), and their creativity is fueled by boredom.
- dayvid 1y ago
  I mean when I was a kid I had action figures and played out scenarios. Would be pretty nuts if you could make your own TV shows with AIs assisting the play. Or set up your own battles, etc. Especially if it had more animatronic entry points
- mst 1y ago
  I feel like it would be creepy if the kid was using it without anybody ever checking up on it ... but I think all of my friends with kids would say that the answer to that is "parenting." I mean, giving a kid an unlocked iPad and not bothering to do basic supervision can also have really creepy results, so I'm unconvinced that something like your work actually makes anything worse in the negligent parenting situation, and seems like it could be a lot of fun in the competent parenting one. If you haven't already done this, I'd note that I can think of a number of parents who would probably rather enjoy a version of story mode that let them collaborate with their child and your code to put together a bedtime story before they turn it off for the night and tuck the kid into bed.

ianbicking 1y ago

What's been your experience with the Realtime API? I've been doing LLM with voice, but haven't really given it a try – the price is so high, and it feels like it's much harder to control. Specifically that you just get one system prompt and then the model takes over entirely. (Though looking at the API, I see you can inject text and do some other things to play around with the session.)

akadeb 1y ago
I agree, it's still pricy. The cost works out better with `gpt-4o-mini-realtime-preview-2024-12-17`. Yep its constrained to the system prompt but I pass in conversation history with each new session to keep it relevant. It also supports tool calling which is clutch. Have you tried Hume AI? They've got a neat suite of APIs that give you more control on each session.
- ianbicking 1y ago
  Hume has been on my radar for a long time, but I've never actually used their products. They keep coming out with new lines and yet I never see anyone talk about them... I'm not sure why? Though it's so hard to figure out their offerings, and some seem to actually be wrappers around other LLMs... Do you know what Hume's latency is like? The completely vertically integrated Realtime API is pretty compelling because of that latency, but it's not as clear to me how they would make that all work with their hybrid system.

wormlord 1y ago

What could go wrong?

akadeb 1y ago
Murphy's law

dayvid 1y ago

Really interesting. Also more powerful if integrated with animatronic movement. Reminds me of Furby. Doesn't even have to be full AI, just augmented with slightly smarter and more flexible capabilities

akadeb 1y ago
thanks David, let me know if you get a chance to try it out!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

stavros 1y ago

This is great, thank you! I can learn a lot from this.

akadeb 1y ago
thank you stavros!

andruby 1y ago

Really nice! Thank you for including a youtube video. It's a little unfortunate that you do time cuts between your "prompt" and the response. I'm curious if you were waiting 0.5s or 10s to get the response. I think the usability/fun of this stands or falls with that latency. Maybe it could be combined with fastvoiceagent.cerebrium.ai (discussed 10 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40805010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40805010) for lower latency

akadeb 1y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I have attached the raw unedited video here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kEmbVInvUrYFwjddyGL8Rz03c0NWVmiy/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kEmbVInvUrYFwjddyGL8Rz03c0N... (sorry the video is a bit long ~5min with some intro about my company :-)

gbertb 1y ago

great stuff! thanks for sharing

akadeb 1y ago
thanks for checking it out Bert

airbreather 1y ago

Great, until built in ads become part of the tech...

akadeb 1y ago
Hi Mr. teddy bear! Hey there buddy! Have you tried brushing with Sensodyne now available at your nearest CVS only for $9.99!