> lovely talking toys can die if the company stops being profitable.

This is a good point to me as a parent -- in a world where this becomes a precious toy, it would be a serious risk of emotional pain if the child experienced this scenario like the death of a pet or friend.

> version with decent hardware that runs a local model

I feel like something small and efficient enough to meet that (today) would be dumb as a post. Like Siri-level dumb.

Personally, I'd prefer a toy which was tethered to a home device. Without a cloud (and thus commercial) dependency, the toy wouldn't be 'smart' outside of Wi-fi range, but I'd design it so that it got 'sleepy' when away from Wi-fi, able to be "woken up" and, in that state, to respond to a few phrases with canned, Siri-like answers. Perhaps new content could be made up for it daily and downloaded to local storage while at home, so that it could still "tell me a story" offline etc.

> This is a good point to me as a parent -- in a world where this becomes a precious toy, it would be a serious risk of emotional pain if the child experienced this scenario like the death of a pet or friend.

We've already seen this exact scenario play out with "Moxie" a few months ago:

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/10/moxie-kids-robot-shuts-down