Key Takeaways
- Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W turned into a storyteller with AI processor for under $50.
- Device uses LLMs to generate bedtime stories for kids, embracing their narrative flaws.
- Simple setup allows for customizable tales, with potential for kid-friendly design customization.
As top-end hardware developers fight to create the most powerful AI processor unit on the market, there is still a thriving niche in the Raspberry Pi scene making use of the technology. While SBCs don’t have the most powerful AI processors, they can still beam data to an external server and have it do all the hard for them. This is exactly what someone did with their Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W to turn it into a bedtime story device for their daughter.
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Turning a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W into a bedtime storyteller
This cool project was the invention of Stefano Mazzocchi on Hackster. While Stefano loved using LLMs, he didn’t like how they would sometimes hallucinate and make stuff up. So, why not put them in a role where their entire job was to make stuff up?
My daughter loves listening to stories being told to her and I’ve been intrigued by the evolution of large language models. These AI models have a “fabulism” problem: they tend to confidently make stuff up. This can be a problem when we use them as oracles, but what if we leaned into that? What if we make them tell stories to kids?
The whole thing costs less than $50 to make and includes a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a Seeed Studio ReSpeaker 2, and a speaker. He also created a program called Fably that uses LLMs to generate bedtime stories for kids. Combine the two, and now you have a device that can make up a tale whenever you please. Of course, there’s nothing comforting with an SBC with a speaker hanging off of it, so perhaps if you were to make it yourself, you could think of a nice shell to create or 3D-print to make it a lot more kid-friendly. But even at its bare bones, this is a cool project that even adults can enjoy.