Notes
Screen-face robot field notes
Round displays as faces: expression engines, head gimbal mechanics, far-field voice and what changes when the robot moves into a car.
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Oct 30, 2026
What toy-safety rules actually change on the PCB and the enclosure
Toy-safety compliance is not a lab step at the end. A screw-secured battery bay, a port a paper clip cannot probe, a volume limiter in the audio path and material choices made before colour approval — each is cheap on the first sketch and expensive after tooling.
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Oct 20, 2026
Parental controls are a hardware decision, not a settings page
Almost every privacy promise in a children's AI toy is limited by the board. A mute switch that cuts a rail, a wake word that runs offline, and a database without a raw-audio column do more for a parent's trust than any app screen.
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Oct 8, 2026
Designing voice for under-eights: what actually changes in the ASR stack
Child speech is not quiet adult speech. Pitch, sentence shape, distance and the habit of walking away change which parts of the recognition stack fail — and the fixes are mostly configuration and tuning, not a different model.
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