A rotary phone where a 5-year-old asks an AI, answers arrive on e-ink

Yumei@li_yumei_

Here’s a rotary phone that lets my 5 yo ask questions and get answers from an AI agent.

Other than using a book or asking someone (both of which he also does), this was the lowest-stimulation way I could think of for him to get answers to his many questions.

The answers are displayed on an e-ink remarkable pro and it’s programmed to always cite a source upfront and avoid the first-person. He knows it’s AI retrieving information from the internet, like a librarian.

He’s not allowed to use the paper pro unsupervised since I want us to discuss the answers and the Socratic questions together.

But he is free to use the phone whenever he wants and he can see how many questions are pending on the e-ink Waveshare (which sometimes my toddler does snatch and hide unfortunately). I can also check questions in the queue from my phone and edit anything that was inaccurately transcribed.

Big h/t to:
@MaximeRivest who made open-source Riddle, which makes it look like the LLM is writing back to you (this is actually the first thing I used Riddle to make…I didn’t know how best to share it but since my X Premium trial expires tomorrow I cobbled this together lol)

@Karenxcheng her viral rotary phone project directly inspired me to reuse our dusty rotary phone (her posts break down the how to and it’s much cleaner since she uses a raspberry pi zero 2!)

@flowidealism introduced me to Socratic thinking with kids in a Montessori talk a couple years ago. I know Socratic AI is everywhere now but I genuinely never heard of Socratic thinking with kids before him and it’s such a fun and enriching way to strengthen thinking with kids. If you have kids I highly recommend it!