My daughter is eleven and I'd like to help her ask more questions and get answers. Not just the "hey siri/google/alexa" kind, but conversational ones (and to be able to do it when I'm not around).
The obvious solution ... hand her ChatGPT or Gemini ... isn't gonna work. Not because the technology is bad, but because it isn't really designed for her, and the safety model assumes good faith.
The interface assumes an adult (and most adults use them wrong too! ... or severely under-use them ... but, that's a different conversation).
So I built CurioPod: an AI learning companion that runs on your own infrastructure, uses your own API key, and stores conversations in a database you control.
It has learning modes (math uses Socratic questioning, science suggests experiments, story mode collaborates on fiction).
It has a parent dashboard where I can read every conversation. It has content moderation that flags concerning topics without blocking curiosity about the world's harder edges.
The architecture is simple by design: Cloudflare Workers, a D1 database, vanilla TypeScript. No framework dependencies to rot. A family can deploy their own instance in an afternoon. API costs run a few dollars a month depending on usage: roughly what you'd spend on a single kids' app.
I'm open-sourcing it today (There may be a multi-tenant 'managed' solution built around this later, but I don't have time for that anytime soon!)
The problem I was solving ... how do you give a child access to powerful AI without surrendering oversight ... isn't unique to my family. And the solution doesn't require scale or venture funding or a business model. All you need right now is a Gemini API key (which btw, you can get whether or not you have a paid Gemini account).
There's a deeper reason too. The discourse around children and AI oscillates between utopian and apocalyptic, and both framings share an assumption: that the technology arrives fully formed from elsewhere, and our only choice is acceptance or refusal. I wanted to build something that demonstrated a third option. You can shape these tools. You can just run them yourself!
Here are some sample screenshots:
Welcome
Math
Science
Stories
Parent Dashboard
CurioPod isn't perfect. The prompts need tuning. The UI is functional rather than beautiful. I'm still working through edge cases in the content moderation. But it works, and my daughter uses it most days, and I can see exactly what she's learning and wondering about.
The code is at https://github.com/abacusnoir/curiopod. Setup takes about thirty minutes. You'll need to run a few commands in a terminal, and the docs walk you through each one.
If you try it, let me know how it goes!