Show HN: Screenless SMS for Kids I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on that allows my daughter to text message me without a phone or screen. She handwrites me a note and then it OCRs and sends it to me as an SMS (along with a picture of the note because 5 year old handwriting can be tricky). I text back and my response is printed for her via a thermal printer. It’s been surprisingly fun. Some features I've added: - texting multiple people - I'm the default but she can write "to: dada" or "to: phonenumber" and it'll text the recipient. I made a simple UI for editing the phone number/device id to name mapping. - A bit of extra paper is printed with "to: sender" at the top to make it easy to chat back and forth. - GPT support - she can write "to: GPT" and it'll call GPT API and then print out the response. I prompted GPT to make it easy to read for an elementary school child so she can read it herself. - GPT support for me - I can text to: GPT and it'll text me back rather than printing a message. This has been great for my space-obsessed 3 year old. - texting other devices - I have another device set up and they can text message each other. - read outloud - there's a second button that reads whatever text is under the scanner. This is helpful for my 3 year old who can't read. GPT has been fantastic all around. It's way better at OCR-ing kid handwriting than Tesseract or Google OCR and being able to ask questions and get answers at an age (and reading) appropriate level has been great. |