Show HN: Open-source real-time talk-to-AI wearable device for few $
github.com1. In the US, about 1/5 children are hospitalized each year that don’t have a caregiver. Caregiver such as play therapists and parents’ stress can also affect children's emotions.
2. Not everyone is good at making friends and not everyone has a BFF to talk to. Imagine you're having a hard time in life or at work, and you can't tell your parents or friends.
So, we built an open-source project Starmoon and are using affordable hardware components to bring AI characters to real-word objects like toys and plushies to help people emotional growth.
We believe this is a complement tool and it is not intended to replace anyone. Please leave any opinion.
> In the US, about 1/5 children are hospitalized each year that don’t have a caregiver. Caregiver such as play therapists and parents’ stress can also affect children's emotions.
Trust me, large language models are not anywhere close to being able to substitute as an effective parent, therapist, or caregiver. In fact, I'd wager any attempts to do so would have mostly _negative_ effects.
I would implore you to reconsider this as a legitimate use case for your open device.
> We believe this is a complement tool and it is not intended to replace anyone.
Well which is it? Both issues you list heavily imply that your tool will serve as a de facto replacement. But then you finish by saying you don't intend to do that. So what aspects of the problems you listed will be solved as a simple "complement tool"?
I had a quite good social sciences teacher.
I never forget one of his remarks: There can be only one thing that is worse than someone not having a mother - that he has one.
So maybe a chatty LLM is not the worse thing that can happen with someone.
Wow someone had a bad childhood...why even share that with your class?
Why not?
> In fact, I'd wager any attempts to do so would have mostly _negative_ effects.
It does kinda send an interesting message to a child, doesn't it? "You're not worth the time of anybody human, so here's a machine instead."
And that's before the chat even starts (and eventually goes off the rails).
Wouldn't the alternate message be "you're not worth the time of anybody human or machine"? That seems strictly worse.
Might be a good lesson for the world they will enter…see the average customer support experience from large companies these days.
Like in pederatic care, not every child has a parent who takes good care of them. In hospitals, it is more often play therapists who do this work, but their negative stress can also affect children's emotions. For example, some children feel very traumatized before doing line placement/blood test. This tool can help explain the specific process to them using empathic language and encourage them on specific topics.
I mean doctors and play therapists still have to do their job, We have interviewed some doctors who feel particularly frustrated about how to comfort children before tests or surgeries. They hope for a tool can help building comfort for kids -> which means time is faster to run tests.
Ultimately, you are repackaging the services of actual LLM suppliers without having any knowledge or control of how those services might develop in the future. So it is logically and physically impossible for you to represent the fitness of those services for any purpose whatsoever. And anyone else you may have asked questions about this cannot either.
I can only urge you to reconsider how honest, realistic, and credible those promises you make can possibly be. After all, you are playing with the lives and wellbeing of humans here. Every drug and therapeutic device has to go through rigorous vetting and testing before being cleared for human treatment. Ever heard of clinical trials? And you seriously think you can skip that with “we asked some pediatricians”? Please, think again. And ask someone with more domain knowledge than vague hopes in a technology they don't understand.
Thanks for your feedback. I want to clarify that Starmoon is not being positioned as a therapeutic or medical device. Rather, it is intended as a supplementary tool that might potentially support emotional well-being, similar to how some doctors use YouTube videos to comfort kids for non-clinical support. Currently, we have agreements to pilot the product with a few hospitals in London to collect more data through trials to improve it.
Therapists are some of the lowest IQ people and they’re also mostly going to therapists themselves because they have problems of their own. Last person you should get advice from is someone who can’t sort out their own life.
Like trying to learn to swim from a guy who’d drown in a water bottle.
Better a machine than a broken human. By the end of our generation, this overuse of 24 year olds with behavioral problems as diagnosticians will end.
The machine in question is not based on a set of rules of better quality. It regurgitates the average of the exact humans you're talking of. This is no improvement.
> Trust me, large language models are not anywhere close to being able to substitute as an effective parent, therapist, or caregiver.
You're asking us to trust you, but why should we trust you in this matter? Regardless of if I think ChatGPT is any good at those things, you'd need some supporting evidence for that one way or another before continuing.
It's an expression. In this context I just meant "it should be obvious". Maybe try steel-manning my argument first. If you really can't see why that's likely the case after using a LLM yourself, then I'll be happy to admit that I'm making an emotional argument and you're in no way required to "trust me".
https://chatgpt.com/share/6701aab3-2138-8009-b6b8-ec345b4382...
Why is that "not anywhere close to being able to substitute as an effective parent, therapist, or caregiver."?
Maybe I've had a bad parents/therapists/caregivers all my life, but it seems like an entirely reasonable response. If there's a more specific scenario you'd like me to pose and show me that it's advice is no good, I'm happy to ask it.
I gladly admit that I was making an appeal to emotional intelligence and you won't likely agree with me no matter what back and forth we go through.
I'm not sure why you assume I'm coming from a position of bad faith but to skip the back and forth, I'll just plainly state where I'm coming from. I'm agnostic as to the whole thing and ultimately, to be totally transparent, I still have a human therapist, for good reason. But he's only available during set hours so when I'm in crisis at 3am on a Tuesday, I also fully admit that I'll have conversations with ChatGPT. I'm sure I'm not alone in doing so.
I'm not trying to convince you that it's, right now, a replacement for a human parent/therapist/caregiver. it's the "not anywhere close" part that I'm responding to. It's closer than talking with a speak and spell, or a See'n'say, for instance, but also ahead of static worksheets that you can't have a conversation with. I have no idea if this is good for society, and I have no idea where this technology will take us.
I want to know the limitations of this technology, and I'm willing to be convinced that, hey, maybe what some of it's saying isn't helpful as a therapist, because that's interesting. The number of R's in strawberry, for instance has a specific technical reason it's bad at, because of how tokenization works. If, after being fed every psychology textbook, the advice it gives would be egregiously or subtly bad/wrong/harmful, or biased towards, say, giving a Freudian analysis when the industry's moved way past that, I'd like to know and hear about it, so I better know when not to trust its advice and be able to warn others.
i'm of the opinion that it's like self driving cars. Even if you get 99.999% of the way there it's still "not anywhere close" to the real thing because you're speaking with something that has little to no agency and acting as though it's a good substitute for a person.
My instincts tell me that humans are pretty good at detecting this difference. And when they aren't - they still won't like being lied to or tricked about it. You can see it already - generative art, or music for instance is (in some cases) objectively more impressive than art created by humans all else constant. You might trick a contest into giving you an award but the moment people find out it's generated, they almost immediately react angrily and no longer express interest in the result.
That's because they used to attribute the result to a person and now they know it's not a person. The psychology there probably isn't even fully fleshed out, but i feel it instinctively, as I said before. And I suspect others do as well based on the reactions here.
Sorry for assuming bad faith. i've met a lot of persons here who really do think LLM's in their current form are a kind of sentience. Blake Lemoigne (sp?) is a good example of that kind of naïveté.
I too have a human therapist, doctors, etc. And I too find myself chatting with ChatGPT, etc. about personal issues and in certain cases benefit tremendously from it. In particular, whenever it is something I would normally feel embarassed to say to another actual human. Since I am very confident ChatGPT doesn't have feelings or even an internal monologue with which it could "judge" me - I have no issue telling it such things. The benefit here is from the questions I can have answered that would otherwise go unanswered. I think this makes for a potential assistive technology as you implied earlier (better than a worksheet).
But for precisely that same reason, it will never work (in its current form) as a complete substitute for a human. And attempts to do so may in fact be actively harmful (as I originally suggested). Again, I'll just say that I don't think there's yet enough research on this but that "I know it when I see it". Any sufficiently serious topic I discuss with ChatGPT ultimately winds up with me drained because I feel as though I'm talking to a wall and not actually being acknowledged by anyone with agency who matters to me.
I will definitely admit that this is a highly opinionated take and is rooted in a lot of my personal feelings on the matter. As such, I can't really say that I've definitively proven that my point is the correct point. But, I hope you at least get the gist of what I am saying.
For something that's not rigorously defined, 99.999% and 100% is pretty frickin close together in my book. Like, TherapistGPT isn't going to randomly say you should go kill yourself.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure what your point actually is. Is ChatGPT in it's current form, a replacement for human contact? absolutely not. do people have strong emotions around something using a GPU and a bunch of math and was generated instead of being organically hand crafted by a human being, and having it fall into the uncanny valley? totally. is this box of matrices and dot products outputting something I personally find useful, despite shortcomings? yeah.
I agree that there's totally this brick wall feeling when ChatGPT spins itself in circles because it ran out the context window or whatever.
at the end of the day, I think the yacht rock cover of "closer" is fun, even though it's AI generated. however that makes you feel about my opinions.
https://youtu.be/ejubTfUhK9c
> Like, TherapistGPT isn't going to randomly say you should go kill yourself.
It won't literally do that, the labs are all careful about the obvious stuff.
But consider that Google Gemini's bad instructions almost gave someone botulism*, there's a high chance of something like that in almost every field. I couldn't tell you what that would mean in therapy for the same reason I wouldn't have known Gemini's recipe would lead to culturing botulism.
These are certainly more capable than anything before them, but the Peter Principle still applies, we should treat them as no more than interns for now. That may be OK, may even be an improvement on not having them, but it's easy to misjudge them.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724283
Honestly I don't see it as an "obvious" thing.
I won't be surprised if in a couple more years this kind if thing is the norm. I don't think there's anything inherently different from a person that listens to you.
It wasn't obvious for a long time, but the closest we have to a relevant experiment* shows that physical contact is also necessary for parenting, especially soft contact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
Humanoid robots are improving, so I won't say "never", but I will say "not yet". Not in isolation at least.
* and likely the closest we ever will, because it was disturbing enough to a big influence on animal welfare movement
I'm at a loss for words. If you really think there's no difference between a human and a machine, I don't know what to tell you.
>I would implore you to reconsider this as a legitimate use case for your open device.
OP, I would implore you to not listen to any of this "advice" at all and just keep on building really nice things.
I can already think of a dozen valuable applications of it in a therapheutic context.
Ignore those who don't "do".
> Ignore those who don't "do".
I'm actually pretty ok with ignoring those who don't "think" before they "do", not that the OP is one of those people, but "doing" as a mark of virtue seems fairly likely destructive
One day of doing is worth a billion years of thinking.
The world is material, not imaginary.
Ya, I guess, or you could just measure twice and cut once
I would argue just the opposite. Thinking without doing accomplishes very little. Doing without thinking might accomplish something, or it might be utterly destructive and take 1000x the amount of "doing" (and a lot of thinking) to undo.
Agreed, but would add that deciding not to do something is an underappreciated action of doing. If the thinking process results in deciding your deployable resources can be better used, how would that not also be "doing". The act of relentless material production seems so wasteful tasteless.
You and GP and all others in this thread of comments.
Can you share anything you've done so that we can all see it?
There's nothing admirable about charging head-first in the wrong direction.
Perhaps you are a psychic but that is not my case.
"Charging head-first", even in the wrong direction, is the only thing worth doing.
Thank you for all your advice.
I don't want to criticize a cool project but why do people feel the need to create new hardware for AI things? It was the same thing with the rabbit r1. Why do I need a device that contains a screen, a microphone and a camera? I have that, it's called a smartphone. Being a bit smaller doesn't really help because I have my phone with me almost all the time anyways. So it's actually more annoying to carry the phone and the new device instead of just having the phone. I would be happy with it just being an app.
I can answer to this, having worked on an assistant that is always on, from your phone.
The platforms (ios, Android, etc.) are very limiting. It is hard to have something always on and listening. Especially apple is aggressive with apps running in the background.
You need constant permissioning and special privileges. The exposed APIs themselves are not enough to build deep and stable integrations to the level of Siri/Google Assistant.
Oh, I didn't get that it's supposed to always be listening. Maybe I'm not the target audience but I wouldn't want that anyways. If that's important, that might be a good reason. I think this needs to change in the future though if AI agents are supposed to become popular, I can't imagine buying separate hardware every time. Either the integration in the OS needs to become better or Google/Apple will monopolize the market and be the only options.
> Oh, I didn't get that it's supposed to always be listening. Maybe I'm not the target audience but I wouldn't want that anyways.
I don't know about this project, but generally when a voice assistant is "always listening" they mean it's sitting in a low power state listening for a very specific trigger like "Hey Siri" or "OK Google" and literally nothing else. As much as they would probably like to have it really listening all the time, the technology to have a portable device run actual speech recognition and parsing at all times with useful battery life doesn't really exist yet.
You are right, “always listening" they mean it's sitting in a low power state listening for a very specific trigger like "Hey Siri" or "OK Google" and literally nothing else.
Yes, I thought it was button-triggered.
Yes it does. A Nvidia Jetson Nano with a microphone running Whisper with a banana sized battery will give you 8 hours of transcription.
If you have a separate -dedicated- Android smartphone for this task, why wouldn't the app run in the foreground?
In some sense this is what, Rabbit R1 tried to do. they just shipped a low end custom android skin in a new formfactor so that they own the platform. Didn't go well for them
I don't think you're their target audience. I'd love something like this for my kid (who isn't ready for a smartphone).
Other problems are persistence. Have you looked at how hard it is to keep an app running in the background on an iPhone? on a Samsung phone? For an app that needs to be always-on, it's a non-starter unless you're Apple or Google respectively.
We definitely need an alternative to the duopoly iOS/Android
Apple would stop you from scooping up all that delicious delicious data. Google probably would too. Always-on listening requires building e-waste.
>why do people feel the need to create new hardware for AI things?
Because people have agency and hobbies, and they're free to decide what to spend their money and time on.
This tool requires a paid subscription, but it doesn't say how much. The hardware is affordable, but the monthly fees may not be. Also, the hardware is only useful as long as the company's servers are up and running -- better hope they don't go out of business, get sold, etc.
Sorry for the confusion, we are still discussing the paid subscription pricing, but I can be sure that the price of premium subscription will not be higher than $9 per month.
Personally I have found talking to AI to be much more draining than typing. It's a bit like having a phone call vs IM. I'd basically always prefer IM as long as I'm getting quick responses.
Since the new OpenAI voice model launched, I feel the opposite. Some of the responses me and my gf have gotten from it were fantastic. It’s really good at role play and using intonation now. And you can interrupt it halfway through a response if it’s going off track.
For example, I spent 20 minutes the other day talking through some software architecture decisions for a solo project. That was incredible. No way I would have typed out my thoughts as smoothly.
I still use text most of the time (technical or complex problems, copy pasting materials...), but for things like language learning or getting answers while commuting/walking, voice is a no-brainer.
I want to talk my input and read its output. Both are faster.
For the use case that this project is for?
Yeah, I know your point. Compared with human communication, I think talk with AI can be self-paced.
This seems to be yet another reckless and dishonest scam from yet another cohort of AI con artists. From starmoon.app:
> With a platform that supports real-time conversations safe for all ages...Our AI platform can analyse human-speech and emotion, and respond with empathy, offering supportive conversations and personalized learning assistance.
These claims are certainly false. It is not acceptable for AI hucksters to lie about their product in order to make a quick buck, regardless of how many nice words they say about emotional growth.
Do you have a single psychologist on your staff that signed off on any of this? Telling lies about commercial products will get you in trouble with regulators, and it truly seems like you deserve to get in trouble.
Can you please elaborate on why this is 'certainly false'? What is missing?
To me, it looks like you have some experience with the topic and believe that it is very hard to build something like the device in question, but which properties of the solution make you so certain?
The primary thing that's missing is any evidence that the claim is true, or even plausible. There's no indication that they even tested this with kids.
I don't take advertising at face value, even if that advertising might appeal to sci-fi sensibilities. Your question has an air of "well you can't PROVE the flying spaghetti monster is false."
I think the plausibility is granted by the usage of the emotion intelligence model[1].
However, I agree with you that this is very thin ice. Given the selection of books used as decoration in the video, the authors seem to have more of a business background [2] than one of psychology.
I don't like calling someone a liar when no evidence is present (either way). I would rather say: 'Bold claims, can you prove it?'
[1]: https://github.com/StarmoonAI/Starmoon/blob/main/.env.exampl...
[2]: https://youtu.be/59rwFuCMviE?t=69
hey there I am one of the founders. this is our project which we are trying to grow through open-source. I agree our wording can be better so its backed by data and not just a marketing stint.
> Do you have a single psychologist on your staff that signed off on any of this?
We've been talking to pediatricians at portland hospital and cromwell hospital in london to support the "safe for all ages" claim but I agree that we want to back all our claims with data
Note to readers. The Cromwell Hospital is a private company. It is not part of the NHS.
I would argue that most hospitals in the US are private.
These claims are certainly not false. They described ChatGPT.
> It is not acceptable for AI hucksters to lie about their product in order to make a quick buck
You created a fake/throwaway just to make posts with this kind of cheap insults?
I think this is great, ignore the people comparing your project to the commercial Rabbit R1 project, those people are comparing apples and oranges.
A lot of the subscription based pull ins could be replaced by networking into a machine running whisper/ollama etc anyway.
Keep up the great work I say :)
I was a solo latchkey kid from age... 5 or 6 maybe? I developed a love of reading and spent basically all my waking hours that weren't forcibly in the company of others doing that, by myself: summertime in San Diego, teenage me read 2-4 books a day. I grew up to be incredibly introverted (ironic that I work as a product manager, which strongly favors extroverts) and I wonder how differently I might have turned out if a digital companion had urged me to be more social (something my parents never did), or just interacted with me on a regular basis.
I'd love a hardware device that streamed the audio to an HTTP endpoint of my choosing, and played back whatever audio I sent. I can handle the rest myself, but the hardware side is tricky.
So one big question is, will the service refuse to answer when topics like sex, self harm, physical violence, drug use, or the like come up? Every bigcorp LLM tends towards the social propriety of a Victorian governess, and for plenty of people being able to talk about those things is a baseline requirement for even the blandest 'friend'.
Yes, it will refuse, because it uses openAI for the model.
The interesting thing to do with this project would be to fork it and run it with open inference models.
…buuuuuut, this is one of those “modern” web apps that has a dozen third party api dependencies to worry about, built on non-self-hostable platform (superbase) so even if you wanted to, it’s probably actually impossible to run in an isolated sandbox you completely control.
/shrug
In the 2001 movie AI, the protagonist children play with an "old" robotic teddy bear named "Teddy".
The bear's movement isn't great, and its voice sounds robotic. Projects like this make me think that Teddy either could be built with today's tech, or is very close to being buildable.
For sure we are getting toys like that by next xmass. I legit going into my parts bin to see if I can wipe something up to stick in a teddy bear right now... Might not have movement, but a talking teddy bear is fun little project.
Is this specific hardware necessary? If I wanted to run this on a Raspberry Pi zero, for example, is that possible?
Sorry, it currently support esp32-devkit and Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32S3. For the Raspberry Pi Zero, you may need to switch to a different PlatformIO environment and replace the corresponding GPIO pins.
I can see something like this being used in various inspection scenarios. Instead of an inspectior having to fill out a template or fiddle with an ipad-thingie in tight situations they can talk to this, and a LLM converts it to structured data according to a template.
I predicted a Teddy Ruxpin / AG Talking Bear driven by LLMs a while ago. My biggest fear is that the Christmas toy of the year would be a mass produced always listening device that's effectively constantly surveilling and learning about your child, courtesy of Hasbro.
Any plans for being able to run the entire thing locally with local models?
Thanks for asking. We will launch local LLM, STT, and TTS models in the near future versions.
You can make an OpenAI compatible local server using LMStudio[1] and load any model you want. It'd have to be on another host though, the s3 has some inference capabilities with addons afair, but nowhere enough grunt to run locally at any usable token/s
[1] https://lmstudio.ai/
or with open source tools like
llama.cpp - https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/master/examples/...
or
mistral.rs - https://github.com/EricLBuehler/mistral.rs/blob/master/docs/...
lmstudio and ollama use llama.cpp underneath. cut the middle man