There’s a brand new AI-powered toy for teenagers known as Stickerbox, and, earlier than you groan, I’m right here to report that it’s surprisingly enjoyable.
Stickerbox, a product born out of Brooklyn-based startup Hapiko, is a voice-activated sticker printer. The machine takes no matter artistic concept you have got in your head and transforms it right into a printed sticker that you may then coloration, peel, and stick wherever.
Earlier than making an attempt the machine itself, I’ve to confess I got here with a preconceived destructive bias — as did my fellow tester (my daughter). Our preliminary reactions had been similiar: “An AI that prints stickers? I’d rather design and print my own.”
After making an attempt the evaluation unit despatched by the corporate, we had been received over.
Stickerbox, I spotted, may characterize a brand new type of artistic play — and one which doesn’t outsource the kid’s creativeness to an AI mannequin as a lot as you’d suppose.
Testing the AI sticker printer
The $99.99 toy itself is a small, shiny crimson field with a black-and-white display and an enormous, white “push-to-talk” button on high. It ships with three rolls of paper, which equates to 180 stickers, in addition to an influence wire and coloured pencils.
The field’s coloration scheme is harking back to the Etch A Sketch, which is smart, on condition that the Stickerbox appears like a contemporary spin on that idea. Within the Etch A Sketch’s case, you need to learn to management totally different knobs to create the picture in your thoughts. With Stickerbox, these “knobs” are changed with one thing extra summary: the voice instructions you employ to immediate the AI mannequin.
Youngsters aren’t fascinated with the right way to be higher immediate engineers, in fact; they’re simply exploring their creativeness and having enjoyable seeing their concepts come to life. Any enchancment of their prompting skills is a facet impact.
To initially arrange the machine, a mum or dad might want to assist. Very like including a sensible speaker to your own home’s Wi-Fi, you need to first connect with the Stickerbox’s Wi-Fi, then enter the data to attach with your own home community. The setup course of, which solely took a minute, went off with out a hitch.
Utilizing Stickerbox is straightforward. You push the button, describe a picture out loud, then launch the button to see your textual content seem on display, adopted by an AI-generated picture because the printer spits out a bodily copy.
There’s a serendipity to an expertise wherein you’re pondering of an concept after which holding it in your hand in a matter of seconds.
The machine’s thermal picture printer requires no ink, and the paper is BPS and BPA-free, making it secure to make use of.
The printed sticker is simple to tear off after which could be coloured in with the coloured pencils that include the machine. Your individual crayons and markers additionally work. This combines the considerably dopamine-driven expertise of pondering up new issues to print with the extra calming or meditative features that include coloring, much like giving children a coloring guide.
This ended up providing a wholesome stability between utilizing doubtlessly addictive tech after which slowing down to interact in a real-world exercise. It additionally helped to deal with potential boredom.
The extra you employ the Sitckerbox, the extra you notice how complicated your prompts could be. You don’t simply need to ask for a primary picture, like a “magical unicorn,” you’ll be able to communicate to the Stickerbox with lengthy, train-of-thought instructions, and the AI parses what you imply. (That is significantly helpful given that youngsters don’t have a tendency to elucidate issues in an easy trend.)
Making “AI for Kids”
Hapiko, the corporate behind Stickerbox, was based this 12 months by CEO Arun Gupta and CTO Robert (Bob)Whitney. The pair initially met whereas working on the e-commerce market Grailed, the place Whitney was director of engineering and Gupta was CEO. (The corporate bought to GOAT Group in 2022.)
Earlier than Grailed, Gupta based and launched the Y Combinator-backed {hardware} sleep tracker WakeMate.
Whitney, in the meantime, had labored because the director of engineering at The New York Instances’ Video games division, because the writer pivoted from providing simply crosswords to changing into a full-fledged gaming app, buying Wordle and launching different video games like Connections and Strads. Whereas that have taught him lots about what makes an incredible consumer-facing product, his later stint at Anthropic gave him a first-hand have a look at the advances in AI know-how.
Nevertheless, it was his expertise as a father that impressed Stickerbox.
When his son requested for a coloring web page he didn’t have readily available, he turned to ChatGPT to make a printable picture.
“I made it for him — a tiger eating ice cream. And he had never seen a printer before. I got out from under the bed, our HP brother printer — literally dusted it off and printed it for him, and he ran off happily and started coloring it,” defined Whitney. “But, a minute later, the gears were turning, and he came back to me, and he was like, ‘I want a lizard riding a skateboard.’ And I was like, okay, cool, let me make that for you.”
His son was so thrilled with the method of with the ability to say one thing and see it come to life that he realized there might be one thing to this.
“I just saw this look on his face of magic — like pure magic,” famous Whitney.
The co-founders had been additionally fascinated with how AI know-how supplied so many novel experiences, however most weren’t made for teenagers.
“Nobody’s building AI specifically for kids. So that’s what we’re looking for,” mentioned Gupta. “What are the right guardrails? What are the right ways? What are the right products?”
They realized that youngsters have nice imaginations, superb for working with an AI picture mannequin.
“[They have] endless imagination and creativity … they’re learning new things every day. Every week, they’ve got a new obsession. We’re literally the first people in the world, I think, to put an image model inside of a box,” Gupta mentioned.
Constructed for Updates
Beneath the hood, Stickerbox really makes use of a mixture of AI fashions, together with its personal proprietary tech centered on making the machine kid-safe. It received’t reply to requests for dangerous content material, like violence or sexual imagery, and it filters out swear phrases. And in case you strive a considerably extra innocuous command, like “boobs,” it simply prints a random sticker which may be vaguely associated to the phrase. (For example, you may get a generic cartoon woman, however not a large-chested one.)
After making an attempt and failing to get a naughty outcome, most youngsters will possible return to simply prompting the machine for foolish photos as a substitute.
“We want to be the trusted brand for parents where you don’t have to look over your kid’s shoulder and be like, ‘what are they doing? How are they using this?,” mentioned Gupta.
For now, the corporate generates some income from the machine gross sales, however it retains the price of restocking paper low. It’s simply $5.99 for 3 rolls, which equates to 180 stickers. (It’s at the moment operating a promotion that provides six rolls with each buy now.)
Over time, the staff plans to discover including premium options, together with a method to add your individual picture to think about your self in incredible situations or collaboration instruments.
As a Wi-Fi-connected machine, the Stickerbox is often up to date with new firmware and options. In assessments, for example, we had been capable of print some recognizable characters, however a more moderen replace added new guardrails to information children towards extra authentic designs.
A soon-to-launch companion app additionally helps you to view previous creations and save favorites, and will finally function the house for premium options.
Stickerbox is backed by $7 million in funding from Maveron, Serena Williams’ Serena Ventures, the Allen Institute’s AI2 incubator, and varied angels, together with Matt Brezina, and product leaders from different shopper apps.
