We were telling stories to our 6-year-old and 4-year-old sons when GPT-4 came out. We said, 'Let’s have a story where you two are the heroes!' They were so excited! They jumped on the bed, squealing and refusing to sleep. It was clear that AI had really changed how kids enjoy stories—and it freed us from the nightly struggle of coming up with new tales!

Then, during that week, they went crazy, sharing their ideas and wanting us to weave them into the stories. At first, we relied a lot on AI-generated content, but gradually, we felt that the quality just wasn't good enough from a parent's perspective. Plus, we didn't want them waiting on our phones every day for new stories.

Fortunately, our ideas came together, and we found different partners. One was a Torrance-certified creativity expert with years of experience in children's content. He was amazed by the experiences we offered kids and decided to join us, bringing his scientific methods for fostering creativity into our product. Another partner was an expert in smart hardware, allowing us to provide kids with real screen-free time. By the end of December 2023, we had our first prototype. The experience was rough, but it really worked, and the kids had a blast!

We didn't continue with the first generation of our hardware because we realized that the conversational environment for kids was more complex than we had imagined. During our tests with children, we encountered many issues that we couldn't solve at the core level. So, we shifted our focus to developing a second-generation hardware solution. By that point, we were finally able to offer a more stable interactive storytelling experience.

Later, we ran into some issues on LLM side. Can you imagine? The token cost was about $90 per device—totally crazy! We also had to be very careful about how AI provided feedback to our kids. Every conversation node needed to be reviewed to ensure there were no privacy issues, inappropriate responses, and that the pricing was affordable for consumers. After six more months of work, we were lucky to have another expert team join us, and we finally solved this problem.

Right now, we’re testing our prototypes in some preschools and elementary schools in Boston and Minnesota, and we've received great feedback. The factory is already setting up for production. After some ups and downs, we're ready to start pre-selling our product. Every step has been worth it, especially when you see kids playing safely and, more importantly, not just being handed a tablet to entertain themselves!