Companion is a small AI device that listens, remembers, and stays close — entirely offline. It started as quiet company for older adults living alone. Now the same engine is becoming a companion for children too.
An older adult reminiscing about a trip they took decades ago, and a child chattering about their soccer game, are not asking for a research assistant. They're asking to be heard, remembered, and delighted by a familiar voice — a job a small, cheap, entirely on-device model already does well, without a data center, a subscription, or a line to the outside world.
A few billion parameters, running on the device itself, is enough for memory-aware, in-character conversation. Nobody in this audience is asking Companion to solve a math problem.
No raw audio, text, or memory ever reaches a server, because there is no server. Conversations happen, and stay, on the device — and in the family's hands.
A model with a smaller range of capability has a smaller range of ways to go wrong — which matters everywhere, and matters most with children.
One device family, one shared engine — pointed at two audiences with very different needs, and given the controls each of them actually requires.
Companion isn't one box trying to be everything. It's two simple parts, split the way a real home actually works.
The part that gets hugged. A soft toy — or, for the eldercare version, a simpler tabletop companion — holding only a microphone and a speaker. No camera, no screen, no compute of its own to worry about.
A small local unit, plugged in and out of sight, that holds the actual model, the memory, and the battery for the household. All the thinking happens here — on-device, never sent anywhere.
Splitting the toy from the hub is what keeps the huggable part cheap and simple, and it's what lets one hub carry several characters, or several children's profiles, in the same home — swap which plush is talking, or which character it's speaking as, without buying new hardware each time.
Companion for Kids is not a rebuild — it runs on the same staged plan already proving itself with the eldercare product, reusing the same model, the same memory system, and the same persona engine.
Prove the conversation and memory architecture works at all.
DoneTest characters and parental controls on a tablet before spending on hardware.
UnderwayProve the experience survives on roughly $60 of real hardware.
PlannedA real plush device, with real families, not just a lab bench.
PlannedCertify it — toy safety, child privacy law — and ship it.
PlannedAn earlier version of this idea leaned on borrowed cartoon characters. We backed away from that on purpose — a warm voice doesn't need a studio logo, and owning the characters means owning the upside, too.
Warm, protective, a little wistful — sings when she's happy.
Cheerful and busy, quick to encourage effort and chores.
Playful and teasing, with a soft heart underneath it.
Slow, soft, and calming — built for the wind-down routine.
These aren't settings a family has to go find. They're the shape the product is built in.
Companion works with no internet connection in normal operation — there's no cloud round-trip to fail, slow down, or listen in on.
Not a missing feature — a decision. It applies to the eldercare device and, if anything, matters even more for a children's one.
A child's conversations are visible to their parent — a parent is responsible for a child. An adult's conversations are not visible to anyone, family included; an older adult is entitled to the same conversational privacy as any other adult.
Companion never asks a child to keep something from a parent, and never positions itself as a replacement for a caregiver's attention.
Medical, legal, or crisis topics don't get an in-character answer — they trigger a scripted "let's go find a grown-up," every time.
Parental controls are enforced on the device itself, behind a PIN — not just in an app a child could simply avoid opening.
This site is the pitch. These are the working documents behind it, for anyone who wants the full architecture, the roadmap gates, and the regulatory read.
The original spec: privacy-first, on-device architecture for older adults living alone.
Download the PDF PDFThe kids extension: original characters, per-child memory, and the parental control system.
Download the PDFHosted at companion.zerostatepress.com/whitepaper/.
Stage A is done: the software core holds a conversation and remembers who it's talking to. Everything genuinely new for the kids product — the character content, per-child memory, and a parental control system worth trusting — is scoped, modest, and already underway. We're raising to carry both products through Stage B and into real, $60 hardware.