I’ve been skeptical about a lot of AI-first gadgets over the last couple of years – the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Pin come to mind – mostly because they promise too much and either underdeliver or fail spectacularly. There’s a lot AI can do well, and maybe at this point what we need are more singularly focused products… Like this tiny device aimed at helping kids explore their creativity.
The Stickerbox from Brooklyn-based startup Hapiko turns your child’s wildest ideas – a tiger eating ice-cream, or a lizard riding a skateboard – into printed stickers they can tear off immediately and color in using regular pencils and crayons.
It uses a combination of AI models to make sense of the prompts and generate monochrome outlined illustrations, while a thermal printer spits out the artwork on BPA- and BPS-free paper.
Hapiko Inc.
That’s all there is to it, and it’s kind of genius, really. The idea came from Hapiko co-founder Bob Whitney who recently found himself dusting off a desktop printer at home to make coloring pages based on his son’s imaginative ideas.
The compact Stickerbox – a 3.75-inch (9.5 cm) cube that fits on a child’s desk – streamlines that entire process, and puts kids in control of the artistic output.
Meet Stickerbox: Creativity That Sticks
The company says it’s committed to ensuring your child doesn’t encounter anything nasty while using the device. To that end, its AI only listens for prompts for as long as the big button on top of the Stickerbox is pressed, and doesn’t continue listening in the background or store voice data.
It’s designed to filter out curse words from prompts, and also to block inappropriate content before it even appears on the Stickerbox’s screen or gets printed. Plus, the upcoming companion mobile app will allow parents to review creations that the box has previously printed.
Hapiko Inc.
Beyond getting kids to spend time coloring and off screens, I appreciate the idea of the Stickerbox encouraging kids to exercise their powers of imagination; as TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez noted in her review, the device isn’t limited to basic prompts; it handles extended train-of-thought ideas, so kids can be as descriptive or silly as they want.
Hapiko Inc.
The Stickerbox seems pretty reasonably priced at US$99; that includes a set of colored pencils and three paper rolls (which works out to 180 stickers). You can purchase additional rolls from the company, at $5.99 for a pack of three.
Hapiko Inc.
While the output already looks pretty neat, I wonder if it could also print on transparent sheets so kids can integrate their creations into existing scenes on different surfaces. There’s also no way to print a previous design, or save a ‘character’ to use in new ones. It would be neat to see features like those in a future over-the-air update for the device.
Find the Stickerbox on Hapiko’s product site.
Source: Hapiko Inc.
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