alibova

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on that allows my daughter to text message me without a phone or screen. She handwrites me a note and then it OCRs and sends it to me as an SMS (along with a picture of the note because 5 year old handwriting can be tricky). I text back and my response is printed for her via a thermal printer. It’s been surprisingly fun.

Some features I've added:

- texting multiple people - I'm the default but she can write "to: dada" or "to: phonenumber" and it'll text the recipient. I made a simple UI for editing the phone number/device id to name mapping.

- A bit of extra paper is printed with "to: sender" at the top to make it easy to chat back and forth.

- GPT support - she can write "to: GPT" and it'll call GPT API and then print out the response. I prompted GPT to make it easy to read for an elementary school child so she can read it herself.

- GPT support for me - I can text to: GPT and it'll text me back rather than printing a message. This has been great for my space-obsessed 3 year old.

- texting other devices - I have another device set up and they can text message each other.

- read outloud - there's a second button that reads whatever text is under the scanner. This is helpful for my 3 year old who can't read.

GPT has been fantastic all around. It's way better at OCR-ing kid handwriting than Tesseract or Google OCR and being able to ask questions and get answers at an age (and reading) appropriate level has been great.

https://imgur.com/6qm6JmK

https://imgur.com/xRPkRwu

https://imgur.com/EZEHBEK

I wanted to share a few AI related things I've made for my kids (ages 2 and 4). It's mind blowing that the tech didn't exist in a useful state a year ago and now I end up using it almost daily.

1. Story creator app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/custom-ai-stories/id1669159225 - iphone app to create and read stories. This uses the openAI API and Amazon Polly (text to speech). Icon generated by Midjourney. Recently the stories have been taking a bit longer than the estimate to generate, I think due to increased openAI API usage

2. Belle uses the potty book - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PBVZeM3PdDYQDF0VJrU-sRn6v43AqSmaqm-w-08Tmyo/edit?usp=sharing - the images were created using Midjourney. Most of the children's books I've made for the kiddos are on random financial topics without a main character so it was fun to try Midjourney for this one.

3. Children's book recommender - https://www.yes.ai/bookrec/?library=paloalto - GPT powered book recommendations with a link to get it from the local library.

4. AI robot - https://photos.app.goo.gl/3RnYVF1qCsbq3PbR6 - A raspberry pi powered voice interface for chatGPT. You push the button to ask it a question, it sends to openAI and then reads outloud the response. Speech to text isn't great on toddler voices so this hasn't been used as much as I had hoped.

5. textGPT - https://www.twilio.com/blog/text-ai-assistant-gpt-3-aws-lambda-twilio - I set up a phone number so I could text GPT as needed instead of using the web UI, I've used it for random things like suggesting nearby u-pick strawberry farms and answering questions about dinosaurs.

I'd love to hear what AI related things you guys are building.

I've written up a few projects for the Twilio blog (https://www.twilio.com/blog/author/acohen) but the majority of my projects aren't Twilio related, is there something like that (not just a personal blog) for random fun side projects? I usually make a combination of hardware and software (programmable robot for toddlers, automatic reader bee for baby, etc.)

Question inspired by the name https://tinyprojects.dev/ - is there a good community for sharing "tiny projects"? I love building small, semi-useful projects (hardware and software) and don't have a community to share with. HN seems to be more for articles and start up launches.