Launching today
Yoggi
Safe AI chat for kids
72 followers
Safe AI chat for kids
72 followers
Yoggi is the AI assistant built for children aged 3–15. Age-adapted answers, live voice chat, image generation, strict content filtering, and parental controls. Free on iOS and Android.
the emotional-dependency safeguards you described for teens make sense, but I think the 3-5 end of the range is a different problem, not the same one scaled down. a kid that age doesn't reliably distinguish "talking to a program" from "talking to something alive," especially with voice chat making it feel like a real back-and-forth. is there anything specifically aimed at that youngest bracket to keep reinforcing "this isn't a person," or is the current design tuned more toward the dependency risk that shows up with older kids?
@galdayan That’s a very fair distinction, and I agree that the 3–5 age group shouldn’t simply be treated as a smaller version of older children.
Yoggi already avoids presenting itself as human and can explicitly remind children that it is a program, but your point goes further: at that age, a child may understand the words without fully understanding the distinction, especially when voice makes the interaction feel very natural.
I’m now considering whether some features that make the interaction feel more human, particularly live voice conversations, should be limited, redesigned or disabled for the youngest age profiles. Another possibility would be a more parent-led mode, with stronger and more frequent visual and verbal reminders that Yoggi is not a person and does not have feelings.
The current safeguards were initially designed largely around emotional dependency in older children, so this is a genuinely useful challenge to the product. The youngest age group may need a fundamentally different interaction model, not just simpler language.
Thank you for raising it.
@hannesh Thanks! Great question. The AI receives the child's age (stored in their profile) and adjusts on three levels:
Response length
Vocabulary complexity: short, very simple sentences for younger kids vs. longer, richer ones for older kids)
Tone: for teens specifically, we explicitly tell the model to drop the childish/playful register and speak in a more mature, natural way, closer to how you'd talk to a young adult
It's re-evaluated on every message, so the experience actually shifts as the child grows.
I've had conversations with parents and they told me that they want for their kids to learn AI without becoming dependent on it. How did you test whether the conversations actually felt natural for children?
@reda_roqai_chaoui That’s a really important question, and honestly, testing this is still an ongoing process.
I’ve built an experimental evaluation system that regularly runs Yoggi through predefined conversations using different age profiles. It checks whether the tone, vocabulary and level of explanation are appropriate, and whether Yoggi behaves as intended in specific situations.
For example, it verifies whether a concerning topic correctly triggers an alert, whether Yoggi makes it clear that it doesn’t have human emotions, avoids encouraging emotional dependency, and recommends speaking to a parent or another trusted adult when appropriate.
It also looks at whether the conversation feels natural and encourages the child to think, rather than simply providing an immediate answer.
I’m also exploring a “report this message” feature, so families could flag a response that felt inappropriate, unhelpful or simply wrong. That would provide valuable real-world feedback when the AI misses the mark, without requiring conversations to be routinely reviewed.
This is very much a daily process of experimentation and improvement. One of the hardest parts is finding responsible ways to learn from parents without being intrusive, I don’t want to rely on constant emails, surveys or disruptive notifications just to collect feedback.
Automated testing will never replace feedback from real families, so the goal is to gradually build thoughtful, privacy-conscious ways for parents to help shape how Yoggi speaks and behaves.
For a young child using voice chat, one question will eventually come: "Yoggi, are you my friend?". How do you handle that kind of question, especially in terms of boundaries?
Congrats on the launch!
@jared_salois Thank you, and great question, it's actually one we thought hard about.
Our approach is simple: Yoggi can be warm and fun, but it's never designed to feel like a replacement for real relationships. So when a child asks "are you my friend?", it won't brush it off, but it will also gently steer the moment back toward the people who actually matter in that child's life: parents, siblings, friends at school... rather than positioning itself as one of them.
Practically, that means two things. It never pretends to remember things long-term or claims feelings it doesn't have (no false sense of continuity or intimacy). And if a child asks what it really is, it always says clearly that it's an AI, in a way that fits their age.
This isn't a scripted answer for that one question, it's a boundary that shapes how it talks in general, every day. For us, keeping kids engaged and having fun with Yoggi is great, but never at the cost of blurring that line with the real people around them.
@lucas_cyber_waffle The no false memory design makes sense. But for younger kids using Yoggi daily, could forgetting become confusing too? “But I told you about my dog yesterday.” How do you handle that moment?
One thing I'd love to see is a shared family dashboard where parents can review conversation topics their kids explored with Yoggi that week. It would make the parental controls feel less like a black box and help families start real conversations offline based on what their children are curious about.
@erturultaaz8ux Thanks so much for this suggestion, I completely agree that parental controls should help create real conversations, not just monitor activity.
Yoggi actually already includes a weekly email summary of the topics a child explored, as well as a daily recap directly inside the app. The goal is exactly what you described: helping parents understand their child’s interests, questions and concerns, so they can continue those conversations offline.
I’m really glad you mentioned it, as it confirms that this is an important part of the experience. I’d love to hear what information you would personally find most useful in such a dashboard.
Congrats on the launch! Age-adapting the AI's tone from a 3-year-old to a 15-year-old is a genuinely hard problem, most tools I've seen just pick one register and hope it works for everyone.
I'm curious how long a child's conversation transcripts get kept around for the weekly summaries and safety alerts, and who besides the parent can pull up that history once it's stored. That retention detail is the part I'd want spelled out for something built around kids.
@vollos Thank you, and I completely agree that retention should be clearly explained for a product built for children.
At the moment, conversation history is kept for three months. This allows parents to review previous conversations and gives Yoggi enough context to generate daily and weekly recaps. Through the product itself, that history is only available in the PIN-protected parent area; no other user can access it.
I’m also considering giving parents a very simple retention setting. They could keep the current three-month history, choose a shorter period, or opt out of long-term storage entirely. In that last case, conversations would be deleted after the current day, with the clear trade-off that there would be no history or weekly recap available.
I think parents should be able to choose the balance between visibility and data minimisation that feels right for their family, rather than having that decision imposed on them.