Companion is a small device that listens, remembers and stays close — entirely offline. It began as quiet company for older adults living alone. The same engine is now becoming a companion for children, with original characters and parental controls that live on the device itself.
An older adult reminiscing about a trip decades ago, and a child chattering about their football game, are not asking for a research assistant. They are asking to be heard, remembered and delighted by a familiar voice. That is a job a small, inexpensive, entirely on-device model already does well, without a data centre, a subscription or a line to the outside world.
Running on the device itself, a small model handles memory-aware, in-character conversation. It does not need to be brilliant. It needs to be present and consistent.
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 failure modes. That 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.
Quiet company for older adults. A private, always-on-device listener that remembers who you are and what you told it last time. Not a smart speaker. A presence.
The extension: original characters and real parental controls. Four in-house characters built to hit the warm notes of a favourite cartoon without renting one.
Companion is not one box trying to be everything. It is two simple parts, split the way a real home actually works.
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. It talks to the hub over local wireless with no internet involved.
A small local unit, plugged in and out of sight, that holds the model, the memory and the household's characters. Splitting the toy from the hub keeps the huggable part cheap and lets one hub carry several characters or several children's profiles without buying new hardware.
These are not settings a family has to go and find. They are the shape the product is built in.
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, memory system and persona engine. The hardest question, whether a tiny offline model makes a good companion, is already answered.
No. In normal operation Companion works with no internet connection at all. The language model, the memory and the character engine run on a small hub inside the home. There is no cloud round-trip to fail, slow down or listen in.
Never. Companion holds only a microphone and a speaker. That applies to the eldercare device and matters even more for a children's one.
No. Family can see that she is talking and for how long, never what she said. There is no transcript, summary or content available to anyone. An older adult is entitled to the same conversational privacy as any other adult.
Everything. A parent dashboard shows exactly what the device knows about the child, because the parent owns the account. Companion never asks a child to keep a secret from a parent, about anything, and parental controls are enforced on the device behind a PIN rather than in an app a child could avoid opening.
It does not get an in-character answer. Those topics trigger a scripted "let's go find a grown-up" response, every time.
A few billion parameters, running on the device. That is enough for memory-aware, in-character conversation. Nobody in this audience is asking Companion to solve a maths problem, and a model with a narrower range of capability has a narrower range of ways to go wrong.
Not yet. The software core is built and proven. Field prototypes on a tablet are underway, and the embedded port onto roughly $60 of hardware is the next stage. Create an account and request access to follow the build, or contact us about the pre-seed round.
Companion is being built in the open with a small group of collaborators and early supporters. Create a free ZeroState Labs account, request access, and once it is approved this address opens up to: