AI toy I worked on is in stores
Alt link: https://mrchristmas.com/products/santas-magical-telephone
Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z7QJxZWFQg
The first time I talked with AI santa and it responded with a joke I was HOOKED. The fun/nonsense doesn't click until you try it yourself. What's even more exciting is you can build it yourself:
libpeer: https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer
pion: https://github.com/pion/webrtc
Then go do all your fun logic in your Pion server. Connect to any Voice AI provider, or roll your own via Open Source. Anything is possible.
If you have questions or hit any roadblocks I would love to help you. I have lots of hardware snippets on my GitHub: https://github.com/sean-der.
I'm a technologist. I get it, on some level it's kinda cool that we have the technology to bring this thing into the world, and so of course one wants to build it and make it real.
Breadboarding it as a fun weekend project is one thing. But making it exist as a product sold on Walmart.com is another.
What is the point, exactly? I mean this as a serious question to think about, not as a blanket dismissal. Any object, by the mere fact that it exists, demands something from the people it is put in contact with. What behaviors does it encourage, what beliefs does it promote, what skills does it exercise?
If I spend 60 minutes with my kids writing a physical letter to Santa, then going out and putting it in a mailbox, I have a fair sense of the answers to the questions above, and whether those answers are things I want to encourage or not.
If they spend 60 minutes interacting with this object, I'm not so sure I feel so confident about the answers.
Just imagine how people must've failed against the first electronic toys 80 years ago, or Pokémon 30 years ago. Ask yourself... if this makes you depressed, what exact kind of new technology would make you happy?
50 years from now AI powered toys will be so ubiquitous and common to people, they will barely blink.
There was a time where people thought the same about nuclear energy. That every device is powered by its own small reactor. They sold even radioactive toys and medicine.
Or think of plastics. A technological success story but now we find plastics everywhere. On the bottom of the oceans and inside our bodies.
50 years from now people may ask why we wasted so much resources on AI.
This constant negative sentiment on the internet... the brushing off of what has happened. I can only explain it as a form of fear. The fear of the end of human work, human relationships, human interactions...
But I think within that fear is a lack of appreciation of the magnitude of what is happening now.
indistinguishable from what humans once created
It's distinguishable from original art in that it is, by definition, derivative and unoriginal.
All art is derivative to some extent, because all artists have absorbed cultural influences and have seen prior art. But some art contains elements and ideas which are not synthesized from prior art. You can prove this. If art were only synthesized from prior art, then there would never be any addition to its vocabulary. There are conceptual "breakthroughs" which cannot happen just by looking at and iterating upon existing art.
If an AI had been trained only on classical Greek sculpture, it could not invent Cubism or Impressionism or Surrealism. Not just that: It would have no reason to invent these schools of art. The only impetus it might have would be if a human asked it to invent a school of art; and then it could only draw upon its training data.
That's why to call AI output "art" is to fundamentally misunderstand what art is. Art is not the final result or product. An aesthetically pleasing painting is not automatically art, outside the limited commercial sense. Art is the intention of the artist and the unique characteristics of the artist made manifest in the creative process which required discovering something new. The actual output, the thing on the canvas, is just evidence of that process, it is not the art itself.
More often than not, this is also a physical process involving trial and error with real materials in a world that is many orders of magnitude more complicated than what AI currently understands.
An equation on a blackboard is not a mathematical proof, it is the residue of the logic of the proof. In the same way, a painting is the residue of art. A sculpture is a residue of the artistic process by which a person learned to turn a shapeless mass into an imagined 3D object.
This is why AI can only make simulacrum of the final result of art, the same way it can simulate coming up with a proof for an algorithm. But as we frequently see when we ask it to analyze or create an algorithm, it cannot provide a true proof, because it cannot think of failure modes unless we explicitly point them out, nor can it think of concepts that are not in its existing canon of knowledge.
Maybe with AGI this will change. But passing a Turing test and making pictures doesn't mean it can actually create anything like art.
Of course you don't "need" an LLM to have a great toy. You also don't "need" injection-molded plastic. But if you have access to one or both, that can be pretty great!
Source: I wrote the spec for the first version of the LEGO Mindstorms programming language. These days I build a lot of voice+LLM stuff, some of it for big companies, some of it for myself and my kid.
What do you think of my take here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575175? These 'LLM Role play' toys have hit a real fun spot with my kids.
How is roleplay with this object different than other toys?
Traditional role play is driven by the child and their imagination, and is essentially free of constraints. This is driven by the technology, follows a narrow script, and only allows for a single mode of engagement. Not saying that makes it good or bad, but they're clearly 2 different modes of play.
If you get lost in a D&D game is that bad because the world isn't real
D&D is fundamentally a social activity (by definition, you can't play D&D alone)...
Getting lost in Myst
...enjoying a piece of art built by a creative team with an artistic vision...
making Doom WADs
... an open ended, constructive activity that exercises various skills and that gives you something to share/show for it.
Do you really not see how all of the above are fundamentally different from interacting with this black box that pretends to be something it's not (a human voice), is fundamentally extractive because of the technology it runs on (pay more for more time with it), not to get into the fact that a) the data gets siphoned off to a corporation with its own profit motives and b) there is absolutely 0 guarantee that the simulation can't go off rails?
These 'LLM Role play' toys have hit a real fun spot with my kids.
Coca-Cola and McDonald's hit a real fun spot with kids as well. This on its own is a weak argument of value.
Clearly playing with this for a bit isn't going to be catastrophic for the child (although $99 for 60 minutes of play, with pay-for-more beyond that point, is a pretty darn steep asking price, if you ask me - and if the child enjoys it, it means they will be begging their parent to cough up more money for more time - a pretty poor success case for a toy. Normally once a toy is bought, infinite time can be spent with it with no further financial transaction).
Is it desirable to build a world where kids spend more time with this category of toy over others (in effect priming them for being an AI girlfriend/boyfriend app subscriber a few years down the line)?
id software had a profit motive right? As a kid it didn’t occur to me. I just nagged my parents to pay for Doom/Heretic.
I also have done everything to encourage/empower DIY. My hope is that users that are curious can learn more/build it themselves.
Normally once a toy is bought, infinite time can be spent with it with no further financial transaction
I can’t think of any case where that is true. Books/toys all get worn and may need to be replaced. I have bought my son the same toy forklift three times because it breaks and he really loves it.
Is it desirable to build a world where kids spend more time with this category of toy over others
I would rather see my kids play with this technology than consumption only (videos). Other play is better then doing Santa role play, but this isn’t close to be worse at all.
Of course there are things technologies can do that are bad. For kids. For adults. For societies. But I build this kind of voice+LLM stuff, too, and have a kid, and the exploration, play, and learning opportunities here are really, really amazing.
For example, we are within reach of giving every child in the world a personalized, infinitely patient tutor that can cover any subject at the right level for that child. This doesn't replace classroom teachers. It augments what you can do in school, and what kids will be able to do outside of school hours.
There are books, lego bricks, and other toys in my family that have now gone through three generations of kids and are ready for a fourth.
I understand you’re fighting hard to defend the thing you built, but come on.
And yeah, if you’re comparing this to TikTok brainrot, sure, I guess it’s one step above.
AI on the other hand
https://dailyai.com/2025/05/chatgpt-is-making-people-think-t...
And this happens to adults who know it’s AI
As far as an object just existing and demanding something, though, I feel like you could say the same about Teddy Ruxpin or a singing bass, both of which fit well into comedy and horror, because they sit on a creepy edge between kitsch and nightmare.
But medium-sized and small models never hit that sweet spot between open-ended conversation and reasonably on-the-rails responsiveness to what the user has just said. We don't know yet know how to build models <100B parameters that do that, yet. Seems pretty clear that we'll get there, given the pace of improvement. But we're not there yet.
Now maybe you could argue that a kid is going to be happy with a model that you train to be relatively limited and predictable. And given that kids will talk for hours to a stuffie that doesn't talk back at all, on some level this is a fair point! But you can also argue the other side: kids are the very best open-ended conversationalists in the world. They'll take a conversation anywhere! So giving them an 8B parameter, 4-bit quantized Santa would be a shame.
Having a microcontroller in the phone is nice because it is WAY less likely to break. I love being able to flash a simple firmware/change things would fighting it too much.
Oh! Also I do all the 'WebRTC/AI dev' in the browser. When I get it working how I like, then do I switch over to doing the microcontroller stuff.
I have written implementations target at specific boards. So go and buy one of these and boom stick it in anything you want. I have done this for my kids and have a bunch of different characters. My favorite is my daughter has a toy that pretends to be 'the ocean' it is so funny and existential.
* https://github.com/Sean-Der/realtimeai-embedded-respeaker-li...
* https://github.com/Sean-Der/realtimeai-embedded-esp32-s3-box...
I really loved the Sonatino[0], but can't get it anymore :(
If you start building something shoot me an email and would love to help! I want to unblock/enable this space so bad, I think these kinds of projects are just so delightful :)
I think there would be a market for a pre-built phone that can be adapted to behave differently - think e.g. as a phone in art installation or escape rooms.
What I really wanted to build was a 'tour guide'. I could walk up to a piece of art in the museum and get more info on it. It would also be multilingual. At my local museum all the art descriptions are English only.
Might be too disruptive for a museum though. I want to discourage screen use/let people continue to use their eyes when learning.
You can open up the phone and modify the ESP32. I do that pretty often with IoT devices. It's not as easy as setting a URL, but totally possible if you are determined enough.
Or you mean "in theory yes, but actually no"? Maybe this thing has an ifixit score of 0 so that you'd better not bother?
I would buy a dev board + build it yourself, you will get a much better experience then trying to reuse the existing thing.
Sounds like it. Dude you can be honest here.
Which is almost saying nobody on HN should buy this if they want to get anything more than 60 minutes out of this thing.
Sounds like it. Dude you can be honest here.
I'm going to politely weigh in here and say things Sean won't say about himself.
You're talking to someone who has spent the last ten years building open source WebRTC software that many, many, many people use and that he's never tried to commercialize. He works tirelessly to make the Pion community welcoming to everyone, from engineers with a ton of networking/video experience to brand new contributors. He wrote the guide that should be everyone's first read about WebRTC.[] All of it as a labor of love.
He's being honest.
I am being honest with you. For me the ‘hacker spirit’ means cracking things open and learning how they work. So I totally encourage others to do it.
It would be naive to think that this technology would only be used for good. I have been working on Pion WebRTC for years though and have see lots of stuff getting built that didn't feel great. Not sure what I can do though.
Let your kid call a crude simulacrum of dead relatives, let religious folks call a crude simulacrum of $DEITY, make an "adult" version that crudely simulates a phone-sex hotline (charge extra to recharge the minutes on that one obviously), etc, etc.
make an "adult" version that crudely simulates a phone-sex hotline
This is a quaint almost vintage version of the technology that already exists. Why stop at just audio when you can right now have a "video call" with your AI sexbot? If you were worried porn was going to lose it's top spot for pushing technology forward—and backward and forward and backward—to it's eventual climax then worry no more!
And the really scary question: Am I to be sad if they do?
Are 1-900 numbers still a thing? Are all those people going to lose their jobs?
IIRC, the 900 “area code” is still reserved for that kind of calling in the North American Numbering Plan, but all of the US carriers have withdrawn from doing pass-on billing for 900 calls (in part, IIRC, because the government prohibited them from disconnecting service for nonpayment of those charges), so I don’t think they’ve been a significant business for a while, and most of that kind of business has moved to various online platforms.
I totally understand giving it a 'B'. But I promise you that I came at this project with sincere hope that I can build something that brought more joy then it cost into this world.
I have it at home and I think it's worth the money. My 5 year old uses it and the recordings I got from it I will keep forever.
* Santa tried to end the conversation and she said 'no no no wait, one more present'
* It thought she wanted a llama instead of something else and she hysterically laughed. As she gets older I don't hear that as much, and it made me so happy.
I call bullshit on things all the time, so I get the cynicism. But give it a shot! Seeing kids role-play with LLMs and especially when they hallucinate is a lot of fun. Honestly as the software gets better I think it might not be as fun. It almost feels like the joy of using Linux during the editing your Xorg config days. The chaos is what you fall in love with?
dunno
I'm the "I want to pay a premium to buy something once, and to find joy in how every bit of that thing oozes passion and love by its creator" consumer.
Seeing kids role-play with LLMs and especially when they hallucinate is a lot of fun.
I think this is kinda fucked up
I'm almost out of talk time little one, if you really love me you'll tell your parents to pay more money to keep me alive
Generous Talk Time: 60 minutes of talk time included, and additional minutes are available for purchase for extended holiday entertainment throughout the season
So the thing costs a 100 dollars and then you can only use it for an hour before needing to pay more?
I would rather see this product (and additional minutes) being much cheaper, and honestly, not sold at all. I bet that there is another product that is 5x if not 10x cheaper that sells "taking to Santa" service on a phone which will make plenty of kids happy enough.
My kids would find it so funny hearing Santa doubling down on bringing the wrong toy.
Do the children ask for stuff and then the parent is on the hook to buy it? What if it's too expensive or unavailable? Just a massive disappointment on the day? Does the child expect that it's some kind of binding contract?
Children's imaginations are wonderous, flexible things. As an adult I have sometimes found it a weird experience to play along with my child because my brain keeps trying to delineate between reality and imagination. So who knows how the it's perceived when you're writing a letter.
But if this really does sound realistic, isn't it in danger of leaving the imagination space and setting an expectation?
< old-man-shouts-at-clouds.gif >
[1] Which even many adults apparently don't understand!
I would cut open toys and shove microcontrollers in them.
I think if you lie and tell a kid it’s a real person it would be damaging. My kid has fun role playing, she really suspends disbelief. When done she thinks it’s funny though/not confused.
Ho ho ho! I'm sorry but our time is up. If you'd like to keep talking to me, please provide a credit card number. Merry christmas!
No idea how you'd monetize that, though.
Somehow this device fits well with the Don't be a sucker video linked to elsewhere on this here site[1]. Good advice, valid in many contexts. Don't.
Perhaps a parent commitment that if the kids earn X many goodie (goody?) points, then the CC is charged, and let the parent control how they earn those X points.
Gamifying good behavior has been shown to be pretty effective with kids. See Kadzin.
Ho ho ho! I'm sorry but our time is up. If you want to keep talking to Santa, go into Daddy's wallet or Mommy's purse and bring Santa the rectangular cards with the numbers on it. Now, let's play a numbers game! You read the numbers on that card to me, and I'll tell you what you're getting for Christmas!
Generous Talk Time: 60 minutes of talk time included, and additional minutes are available for purchase for extended holiday entertainment throughout the season
That's not what I understood Santa to be like.
A Chinese father's video of his daughter tearfully saying goodbye to her broken Al learning robot
https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeCry/comments/1o2yf3i/a_chines...
Then the curious will open up the device/try to DIY. Lots of voice ai providers and microcontroller media code is open source!
I don't oppose to the open backend of the device (it should be table-stakes for this kinda thing), but the concept seems really zero-sum and disposable. It relies on a form-factor that most kids don't use and depends on the novelty of AI which will wear off pretty fast. As much as I hate to say it, this should have been an app or a website.
Also, if your eight year old is trying to jailbreak Santa, you might have bigger issues to worry about.
1. Congratulations on getting a product into a major chain’s distribution network. That is a feat and is something to be proud of.
2. Do I think this product should exist? No. There are services that do this already, the only thing different is making it standalone. I fear it’s just another toy that will sit on the shelf and eventually contribute to the e-waste problem.
3. The capitalist in me thinks I would have also done subscriptions and “buy more minutes”, but in practice I don’t think I would have been able to execute on that.
4. Confusing to see a “build your own” in the same breathe. Are you a part of the Mr. Christmas team that built this? Or just contracted to build it based on your experience in hardware?
5. Were you really hooked? Hooked on the technology stack? Or hooked talking to Santa? Do you have kids that you built it for?
Many thoughts rattle around in my head on this one.
4.) Contracted because I wrote the Open Source libraries it uses. I created https://github.com/pion/webrtc and https://webrtcforthecurious.com the company reached out to me because https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer didn't work with Pion. Turned out to be a libpeer bug (which I fixed)
were you really hooked
I have been doing hardware + WebRTC with lots of different projects since then. https://www.youtube.com/@seandubois86 unpaid, that's my proof at least :)
Hooked on the technology stack.
Yes I enjoy doing WebRTC + C https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr... (one of original authors) so I enjoy the tech a lot.
Hooked talking to Santa
I enjoy the unexpected behaviors of Voice AI at this moment in time. In the video I asked Santa about pi, and it responded in a way I didn't expect. I find it absurd/entertaining.
Do you have kids that you built it for
Yes. I have a few toys/personalities that I built for my kid. They make up funny scenarios/personalities and I change the prompt and put it in a different toy. It's fun.
You are part of the problem. You are part of the thing everyone hates about technology in 2025.
This is a bad product.
It's a great product that you can just ignore and not buy and the subscription model is told to you up-front, so there are no surprises.
I think it's a great use of 2025 technology.
So he should just eat the cost that will add up over time, which is an unsustainable business model?
No, I think he should just not have built this product. However, this is my personal feeling and it seems there is some kind of market for it, so what do I know.
btw, https://www.santasmagicaltelephone.com/privacy goes to a 404. Amusing.
That did not happen when I tried it with my nieces and nephews. Lots of screaming, incoherent AND I I I REALLY I WANT, yelling over Santa as he was responding, etc. It was a complete flop.
Anyway I would be astonished if this works well for younger kids.
The YouTube video is great! You might want to repost with a new link, the Walmart link is bad (look at the URL)
However, since this is Hacker News, I must say I'd probably enjoy building this myself using TTS and LLM APIs...
I worked as contractor for company that has relationships with Walmart.
how hard is it to reprogram?
If you do I would love to help!
Remote bricking when your business inevitably folds or turns it off out of malice aside, this thing only has a use for at most 30 days in a uear. But in reality it'll get used a handful of times and thrown in the trash once the kids get bored around December 14th.
What a waste.
My tiny human loves it. I think they’re almost old enough to start learning the joys of jailbreaking this year as a modern twist on phreaking.