Show HN: I open-sourced my AI toy company that runs on ESP32 and OpenAI realtime
100 comments
·April 22, 2025Sean-Der
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.
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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 :)
StefMyb
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
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.
drakenot
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.
akadeb
Yeah the way I am handling this is turn detection which feels unnatural. I like how Livekit handles turn detection with a small model[0][1] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYDrSSEP0h0 [1]https://docs.livekit.io/agents/build/turns/turn-detector/
``` turn_detection: { type: "server_vad", threshold: 0.4, prefix_padding_ms: 400, silence_duration_ms: 1000, }, ```
Sean-Der
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
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
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 ;).
dgellow
Have you recently tried OpenAI voice mode from ChatGPT Plus? It's basically what you describe
drakenot
Yes, I mentioned this in the comment.
I think it is closer, although still even it has a cold start problem. Once you are connected and in-session, it is a better experience.
There is still some "turn based" conversational aspect to it that can be awkward but it is much better. It also helps that you can "tap and hold" to override, which is a bit of a hack but works well in practice for that mobile use-case.
dgellow
Sorry what I meant was: have you tried _recently_? I feel that what you describe is the old implementation. The current version, with a colorful bubble, has very low latency and starts almost instantly. The older version has a UI composed of a white dot on a black background, and is pretty slow. But the more recent one is pure magic IMHO.
hoppp
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
> 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
> 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
zild3d
well for now its either small device that uses APIs or Paddington Bear needs a backpack for his GPU
empath75
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.
mithr
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
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)
mithr
I'll respond to the content, because I think there are some genuine questions amongst the condescension and jumping to conclusions.
> telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship
Does AI today reliably respond with "the truth"? There are countless documented incidents of even full-grown, extremely well-educated adults (e.g. lawyers) believing well-phased hallucinations. Kids, and particularly small kids who haven't yet had much education about critical thinking and what to believe, have no chance. Conversational AI today isn't an uncensured search engine into a set of well-reasoned facts, it's an algorithm constructing a response based on what it's learned people on the internet want to hear, with no real concept of what's right or wrong, or a foundational set of knowledge about the world to contrast with and validate against.
> what exactly is the fear
Being fed reliable-sounding misinformation is one. Another is being used for emotional support (which kids do even with non-talking stuffed animals), when the AI has no real concept of how to emotionally support a kid and could just as easily do the opposite. I guess overall, the concern is having a kid spend a large amount of time talking to "someone" who sounds very convincing, has no real sense of morality or truth, and can potentially distort their world view in negative ways.
And yea, there's also exposing kids to subjects they're in no way equipped to handle yet, or encouraging them to do something that would result in harm to themselves or to others. Kids are very suggestible, and it takes a long while for them to develop a real understanding of the consequences of their actions.
3np
How about encouraging self-harm, even murder and suicide?
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/10/nx-s1-5222574/kids-character-...
https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-a...
xp84
> 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.
georgemcbay
Reminds me of Conan O'Brien's old WikiBear skits
hoppp
Babies often have ipads now. I think they should make an offline toy with decent hardware inside. That would be somethin.
justanotheratom
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?
irq-1
> 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/
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
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
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
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> 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?
Sean-Der
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.
akadeb
Pipecat is awesome! is it similar to what livekit provides?
I think Realtime API adoption would be higher if it is offered on Arduino rather than ESP-IDF as the latter is not very beginner friendly. That was one of the main reasons I built this repo using edge functions instead of a direct WebRTC connection.
supermatt
Fantastic! This will save a ton of work
_neil
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/ [1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/kokoro-web
3D30497420
Maybe inspiration from how Home Assistant can do local speech-to-text and vice versa? 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
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.
behnamoh
am I the only one who finds the unnecessarily positive vibes of OpenAI realtime voices unrealistic, too much, and borderline creepy?
mickael-kerjean
Yep and having it in a child toy is way beyond the border of creepy
akadeb
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
3np
Moreso from the consent- and privacy angle.
mst
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)
scyzoryk_xyz
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?
bethekidyouwant
[flagged]
null
andruby
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) for lower latency
akadeb
Thanks for the feedback. I have attached the raw unedited video here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kEmbVInvUrYFwjddyGL8Rz03c0N... (sorry the video is a bit long ~5min with some intro about my company :-)
vunderba
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
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
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
ianbicking
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
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
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.
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.