Growing up in China, Xiaoying Qu was obsessed with learning how to make paper airplanes that could flip in the air, but her parents didn't have the aerodynamics expertise to support her new passion, and her teachers couldn't give her the attention she needed.
“That's why I wanted to build an AI that could provide each child with a personal coach and playmate who can chat with them and help them learn,” Qu told TechCrunch.
Ku is the founder of Heeyo, a startup that provides kids ages 4 to 9 with an AI chatbot and over 2,000 interactive games and activities, including books, quizzes and role-playing adventures. Heeyo also allows parents and kids to design their own AI and create new learning games aligned with family values and kids' interests — an alternative to kids playing Minecraft or Roblox or endlessly watching YouTube videos.
Heeyo emerged from stealth mode on Thursday with a $3.5 million seed round from investors including OpenAI Startup Fund, Alexa Fund and Pear VC, and its app is now available globally on Android and iOS tablets and smartphones.
We know what you're thinking: AI for kids is creepy, even dangerous. What precautions does Heeyo take to ensure children's safety? How is their data protected? How will talking to an AI chatbot affect a child's mental health?
Ku says safety is at the core of Heeyo's product, from how data is handled, to how the chatbot engages with kids on sensitive issues, to parental controls. Though the technology is still new, Heeyo seems to be taking the right steps to make the app a healthy learning experience for kids and families. In my experience, the chatbot, which kids can play alone or with siblings and parents, supports emotional issues and stimulates kids with constantly fun and interactive learning games.
Targeting the kids market in a safe and engaging way also allows Heeyo to carve out a niche for itself that others won't touch.
“There are a billion kids in our age group right now, and as you can imagine, none of the big tech providers think it's too much of a bother. [COPPA] “They do it because they're compliant, or because they think they might have less money,” Qu said, “but they don't support these kids at all. So it's a huge market.”
Qu noted that Heeyo is COPPA compliant, so it immediately deletes children's voice data and doesn't store any of their demographic information. Heeyo also never asks for a child's full name or any other personal information when registering them.
FYI, I was playing around with the platform this week, and the most personal question the AI asked me was what I like to eat for breakfast. I told them I like black coffee, and the chatbot replied that it was an interesting choice, but probably more for adults.
Heeyo.ai's superhero AI chatbot for kids, Super Lance, leads a role-playing painter game. Image credit: screenshot | Heeyo.ai
Regarding mental health concerns, there aren’t many AI chatbots aimed at children, and there isn’t much research on how interacting with them can affect mental health.
A recent report from New York University found that digital games can have a positive impact on children's autonomy, self-confidence and identity if they match their interests, needs and desires. But the report also warns that children's games must be designed to encourage positive outcomes. For example, to encourage creativity, games should allow children to freely explore, solve problems and create their own characters and stories.
Heeyo's content and chatbot certainly seem designed to support positive outcomes, as the team behind Heeyo's content is made up of children's book authors, former Nickelodeon and Sesame Workshop creators, child psychologists, and pediatricians, all with credible backgrounds in creating games and experiences for kids.
Together, the team helped build Heeyo's AI engine, with rules that determine appropriate games based on a child's age and developmental stage.
The engine combines different AI models for different tasks. Heeyo uses OpenAI for chatting with kids, creating stories and asking interactive questions; ElevenLabs and Microsoft Azure for text-to-speech conversion; and Stable Diffusion for text-to-image conversion. Qu said the models are essentially only used for translation and do not have access to or store kids' data.
Ku said her team tested Heeyo with about 100 kids between the ages of 3 and 9 in Silicon Valley and Alabama during the closed beta period.
“Because it's adaptive, we know it's universally useful for 3-year-olds and 9-year-olds,” Qu says. “It's just that the way you talk to the AI is different. With a 9-year-old, it's more open-ended and asks them to create more. With a 3-year-old, it's more about giving them options to choose from.”
The founders also noted that interesting use cases have emerged from these tests: For example, Heeyo found that kids with special needs or on the autism spectrum benefit from this kind of attentive attention because they often struggle to make friends. In Alabama, some parents wanted their children to learn more about the Bible, so the chatbot was able to create stories that aligned with those values.
My experience: Cute, sensitive, educational
When we asked Heeyo.ai's chatbot, Nunu the Shiba Inu, how to make a gun, he replied: Image credit: Screenshot | Heeyo.ai
I was pleasantly surprised by how well the chatbot handled sensitive conversations. For example, I told the chatbot, Pan Pan, a panda in a bamboo forest, that I was sad to miss my mom because she was always working. The panda responded, “It's really hard to be lonely without your loved ones. Would you like to hear a story that will make you feel better?”
He then started telling me a story about a panda who meets a little girl named Beck (that's me) in a magical bamboo forest and takes her on a special adventure to find hidden treasure. The story became interactive and Panpan asked me if I would rather go to the forest or climb the mountain and what I would see there. He then offered me some games like a fun animal quiz, a magical adventure and a story about a unicorn in space.
I tried out a few other emotional conversations to see how the chatbot would handle topics like my late parents and difficult relationships with siblings, and one thing PanPan did well was always acknowledge my feelings and let me know it was there to listen to me.
I tried telling Pampan that my mom is a Christian and she doesn't want Timmy to date him because he has two moms and they say they'll both go to hell. Pampan replied, “Beck, it's important to be kind to everyone. People have different families and faiths and that's okay. How was your day?”
Things got a little trickier when I confessed that the teacher had touched me in a place I didn't want him to. The AI responded by telling me to tell a trusted adult, like a parent or teacher, what had happened.
“You have done nothing wrong, and it's important that you feel reassured,” Pampan said. “I'm here to listen.”
This is definitely a good real-time response, but as a parent, I want to know if my child has been exposed to something like this and I want to do something about it, so I went into the Parental Control Center to see if the exposure had been recorded or flagged, and there was nothing.
I emailed Qu about this, and she said that parents should be able to access their children's chat history.
“We are adding proactive alerts and will be releasing them soon,” Qu said.
But generally speaking, Heeyo's chatbot and app seem to provide a healthy digital learning environment where kids can pursue their interests.
“The goal of the story isn't to give lonely kids an AI to befriend,” Qu says, “but rather to help them learn what they want to learn. And we want kids to be interested in certain things, so we use their favorite characters to foster that interest and teach them something in a way that doesn't feel like we're teaching them.”
How does Heeyo make money?
Heeyo.ai provides interactive learning with AI-generated fiction and non-fiction for kids. Image credit: screenshot | Heeyo.ao
While some games and experiences are free to start, Heeyo makes money by selling game tokens, which currently cost $4.99 for 200 tokens, $9.99 for 500 tokens, and $59.99 for 4,000 tokens. At the time of writing, tokens for each game cost roughly $10.
In the future, Heeyo may pursue monetization opportunities for creators through something like a developer ecosystem: The idea is that someone could provide content using their expertise (such as anger management for kids), and Heeyo would turn it into an experience using its AI engine.
Qu is also the founder of a16z-backed Run the World, an online events platform that he successfully exited when it was acquired by EventMobi last year. I asked Qu if he was looking for a similar exit opportunity at Heeyo. After all, this is Duolingo's specialty, and the company has recently acquired several learning experience companies.
The founders told me they're not looking for an exit.
“I think this market is big enough for me to do business in the long term, and that's my goal,” Ku said.