I’m building LifeToy.ai, starting with Bearie — a plush toy that talks with kids in real time through AI voice-to-voice.

The goal: give children an empathetic, playful companion that listens, responds, and helps with language, emotions, and everyday routines.

On the tech side: it’s low-latency realtime voice-to-voice (<500ms) built on STT → LLM → TTS, wrapped in a safe, parent-controlled flow. The vision is to make toys feel alive — not screen-based, but warm, safe, and interactive.

I’d love your thoughts: • What do you think about AI companions for kids? • What concerns would you raise as parents, builders, or educators? • What features would make this truly valuable?

If you’re curious, you can sign up for early access here: lifetoy.ai/early-access

This seems dangerous to me. Children have incredible imaginations and easily form bonds with obviously inanimate objects. A toy that seems to be alive could in fact lead a very young child to believe that it’s alive. As a parent, I find that very concerning.

Also, in general, I’m not in favor of AI replacing actual human connections.

There have been a couple attempts at this - which in itself is a spiritual successor to AG Bear [1]. AG Bear was an interactive stuffed animal that would react and mumble back to a child when they talked to it - it was even lauded by child psychologists back in the day.

I myself tried my hand at putting together something similar a year ago but it was significantly more primitive - basically tearing the guts out of a Teddy Ruxpin and stuffing an ESP32 inside of it. The round-trip latency to the local laptop running a full LLM made it rather impractical however.

Here's some immediate feedback:

- Your landing page picture does NOT inspire confidence. It screams cheap ChatGPT image. A mockup of the actual product would be far better.

- Since presumably the LLM isn't running locally, the hardest sell is that you're basically marketing a "real-time listening device". That might make more privacy conscious parents concerned about their young children pretty nervous.

- There's a lot of ad-copy on that page about the potential therapeutical benefits of Bearie. While that might be true, there doesn't seem to be references/mentions of actual therapists/psychologists/etc. or anyone in the medical industry involved with this project.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AG_Bear