Had not even thought about having kids in the house with an AI robot. Obviously there are the more apparent issues (asking about things they don't need to know) but saw a recent article about how ChatGPT and some other models have an implicit confirmation bias when interacting with users. I don't need my kid to reinforce bad ideas from their cute, all knowing, robot friend.
This is the kind of project I really want to make, especially now that LLMs are very capable, even the small ones. Just need a good computer to run the model off of. I wonder what happened to Mycroft? I looked forward to seeing more of it.
I cannot edit my original comment, I posted a thread on HN apparently Mycroft AI was killed by a patent troll that drained their funds with legal fees. Patent trolling should really have legal consequences for suing people while not actually providing value to society.
Local inference is definitely a good way to go here. Latency when talking to an embodied robot is extremely noticeable though, and pauses during voice chats are way worse than during text chats.
Putting a hat on a tablet has not in fact "instilled a unique personality". If that's what kid are taught I worry how they'll grow up.
I suggest checking Arvind Narayanan's tinkering with his own children. That being said not every parent is a Princeton professor working on AI so tread with caution.
Also on a pragmatic front if you want to tinker on the domain something potentially easy to setup yet relatively open https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
After all this time, I still don't get voice control to interact with technology. Noisy, slow, imprecise, realtime, linear. I think I've only met 2 people ever who genuinely want to do this. Everyone else I know just gets annoyed when they open their voice assistant on their phone by accident.
What this really shows is how fragile "smart" devices are- good hardware, but useless once the cloud goes away. Local first + open systems feel like a preference and more like a necessity now. Also, agree on latency- even small delays feel very noticeable in a robot.
I don’t see the allure here. It’s nothing but an ai assistant that’s already on every phone. The interaction angle is not clean at all. I hear Apple is going to release something similar. Very curious to see how that goes, I am extremely pessimistic on that one. Let’s see
I wanna do this but with a locally running LLM. They’re getting better and better. Can’t wait for something like Taalas to ship custom LLM hardware for personal use
> I usually hold up Big Hero 6 as the canonical example of optimistic robo-futurism
Yeah this shows severe misunderstanding of how sociopaths up there are shaping the future, while masses flock for next dopamine kick to wherever the carrot goes.
And I dont mean the word sociopaths as a slur but rather a factual description of basically all people in power - sillicon valley (or redmont or whatever) moguls, politics, pentagon and so on.
I am not generally a negative person and have rather positive outlook on future overall, but such naivety... no clue where it comes from. Even EU with its open source initiative on one side is visibly a control freak aparatus when looking at other actions. And apart from few small havens like Switzerland EU is still behaving light years better than US where most of these inventions come from. Then there is China. No.
Oh hey, I've had one of those sitting on a shelf! Someone on eBay seems to have a metric fuckton of these things for $50 a whack. 17 left as of my comment.
Unfortunately... yeah, they're all stuck in the useless Esper management still if you factory default them away from whatever weird factory test app they're in. Care to throw us a little bone? ;)
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Mycroft was an open source alternative to Alexa.
https://github.com/mycroftai
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678354
Qwen3 and Gemma models are fairly capable, they are slow-ish (a few tokens per second) but will run.
You can start building with cheap hardware and simple models, and use something more capable once you're more confident on the use case.
It’s something I’m exploring - stay tuned :)
I suggest checking Arvind Narayanan's tinkering with his own children. That being said not every parent is a Princeton professor working on AI so tread with caution.
Also on a pragmatic front if you want to tinker on the domain something potentially easy to setup yet relatively open https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
> I usually hold up Big Hero 6 as the canonical example of optimistic robo-futurism
Yeah this shows severe misunderstanding of how sociopaths up there are shaping the future, while masses flock for next dopamine kick to wherever the carrot goes.
And I dont mean the word sociopaths as a slur but rather a factual description of basically all people in power - sillicon valley (or redmont or whatever) moguls, politics, pentagon and so on.
I am not generally a negative person and have rather positive outlook on future overall, but such naivety... no clue where it comes from. Even EU with its open source initiative on one side is visibly a control freak aparatus when looking at other actions. And apart from few small havens like Switzerland EU is still behaving light years better than US where most of these inventions come from. Then there is China. No.
https://ebay.us/ooX3bU
Unfortunately... yeah, they're all stuck in the useless Esper management still if you factory default them away from whatever weird factory test app they're in. Care to throw us a little bone? ;)