Give your child the
gift of curiosity.
For elementary school — ages 5 to 11
Between five and eleven the questions come faster than anyone can answer them well — and "look it up later" is how curiosity quietly gets dropped. Watima answers every one out loud, pitched to exactly how old they are. All the answers, none of the screen.
Reserve a place with sign-upNo subscription. No payment now — we'll email you when it's ready.
107
questions an hour, at five
Then it falls off a cliff. By ten or eleven, children ask a handful every couple of hours — in one fifth-grade class the researchers watched, two hours passed without a single question. The collapse happens across exactly the years this device is for.
5h 33m
a day on screens, ages 8–12
Entertainment media alone, not counting homework. That is what currently occupies the hours when the questions used to be. A screen is very good at holding attention and very bad at answering one thing and stopping.
6,200
children studied
Followed from birth, curiosity predicted reading and maths scores as strongly as self-control did — and the effect was largest for children from the poorest homes. It is not a soft skill; it is the one that pays.
Sources: Engel, Children's Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools, Harvard Educational Review (2011); Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens (2021); Shah et al., Early Childhood Curiosity and Kindergarten Reading and Math Academic Achievement, Pediatric Research (2018). Watima has not been studied by anyone. These findings are about curiosity and about screens — not about this device, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
THE PROBLEM
Between five and eleven,
the questions outgrow easy answers.
How planes stay up. What a black hole is. Why the dinosaurs died and we didn't. Dozens a day, and they arrive faster than anyone can keep up with.
Right now
The question has two places to go.
A grown-up who doesn't always know. Or a screen that was never designed to give one answer and stop — so handing over a tablet answers the question and starts something else entirely.
With Watima
Screen time, without the screen.
It hears the question, answers it in a sentence or two, and goes quiet. There is nothing to scroll, nothing to watch, and nothing that recommends a next thing.
HOW IT WORKS
Ask, wait, listen.
- 1
Hold and ask
Press anywhere on the face. The ring turns green while it listens.
- 2
Let go
The ring turns amber while it works out the answer.
- 3
Listen
It speaks a sentence or two, then goes back to resting.
No typing, no search results to wade through, no browser that leads somewhere else — which matters at five, and still matters at eleven. The answer length is capped on purpose, so it can't lecture or wander.
FOR YOU
You see everything. You decide what's kept.
The two questions every parent asks about a device like this are what goes in and what comes out. Both are yours to read, and yours to erase.
There is no recording to play back.
Your child's voice travels encrypted, is turned into text, and the audio is
discarded — we never write it to storage. What's kept is the text, for exactly as
long as you choose.
- Nothing happens until you say so A device answers no questions at all until a parent pairs it to an account. That pairing is your consent, and removing the device withdraws it.
- Read every question Every question asked and every answer given, listed by day, for as long as you've asked us to keep them.
- You choose how long Keep nothing, keep an hour so follow-ups make sense, or keep 30 days you can read back. Choosing keep nothing means there's nothing for you to read back either — that's the trade.
- Delete it all, any time Clear a device's whole history in one action. It leaves your dashboard immediately and is purged from our systems; encrypted backups roll off within 30 days.
- Answers stay short Length is capped on purpose, so it can't lecture or wander.
LIMITS
What it won't do.
An honest list, because you're handing this to a child.
It can be wrong
It works from a language model, so it will sometimes be wrong or out of date. An answer is the start of a conversation with you, not a source of record.
It doesn't chat back
It answers and stops. No follow-up question, no prompt to keep going, no greeting when your child picks it up. It builds no picture of them over time.
It can't help in an emergency
It is not a phone, an alarm or a tracker. It cannot call anyone, it does not know where your child is, and it only works on your home Wi-Fi.
It won't answer above your child's age
Age grounding
You set your child's age, and every answer is written for it — the words, the examples, and how much it assumes they already know. A five-year-old gets a sentence about why the sky is blue; an eleven-year-old gets the actual reason. The same question, answered differently, because they are different children.
Review after the answer
A second pass reads each answer once it has already been spoken and flags what shouldn't have been said — content above the age on the device, anything touching self-harm, and similar. When it flags something we tell you, with the question that caused it, and can stop the device answering until you say otherwise. Be clear about what that is and isn't: a safety net that catches things after the fact, not a filter that stops a child hearing them.
THE HARDWARE
Small enough to forget you're holding it.
Fifty millimetres across and fourteen thick — about the size of a bottle cap, on a lanyard. Two microphones, so it still hears the question in a kitchen with the tap running.
The display is there for one reason: to show what it's doing. Green while listening, amber while thinking, blue while speaking. There is nothing to watch on it.
- Size
- 50.2 mm across, 14.5 mm thin
- Screen
- 1.43″ round AMOLED, 466 × 466
- Brightness
- 600 cd/m², 10,000:1 contrast
- Microphones
- Dual array, noise reduction and echo cancellation
- Sound
- Built-in speaker
- Power
- Rechargeable battery, charges over USB-C
- Wireless
- 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi
- In the box
- Device and lanyard
PRICING
$69.99 once. Then only if they keep asking.
No subscription. The device arrives with a million tokens already on it, and you top up only when curiosity actually runs them down.
THE DEVICE — PRE-ORDER
$99.99 $69.99once
Save $30.00 — 30% off, first 10,000 orders
- A million tokens included — enough for 1,000+ short questions*
- Watima, with the lanyard
- Charges over USB-C
- The parent dashboard — read, and delete, everything
- Software updates for as long as we run
- Yours to keep. It does not stop working when the tokens run out — it tells you.
MORE CURIOSITY
$9.99per million tokens
- Buy when you need it. Nothing recurring, nothing to cancel.
- Tokens don't expire
- The same price however many you buy — no bulk tiers, no expiring credits
- The dashboard shows the balance and what's been asked
- A quiet month costs you nothing at all
- Answers keep improving — we update the models, not you
* A million tokens is roughly 1,700 short questions for a five-year-old and about 800 for an eleven-year-old — because Watima matches the answer to the child. A five-year-old gets a sentence; an eleven-year-old gets a real explanation, and a longer answer spends more. The dashboard shows your actual balance and how fast it's going, so you're never guessing.
Pay per curiosity, not per month
We could charge $9.99 every month and cap the device at so many questions a day. Most of this category does. But children aren't monthly. A child hits a dinosaur week and asks forty questions a day, then barely touches it until something at school sets them off again. A monthly plan charges the quiet weeks to pay for the loud ones, and then has to cap the loud ones anyway.
So we meter it instead. You buy tokens, your child spends them at whatever pace their curiosity runs, and a month where nothing catches their interest costs you nothing. No cap on the good days. If they want to spend a Saturday on volcanoes, that's the whole point of the thing.
And when the tokens run out: the device says so, out loud, and stops answering until you top it up. It doesn't brick, it doesn't lose the history, and there is nothing to cancel because there was never anything recurring. We'd rather say that here than bury it in terms you find out about later.
Why you don't bring your own AI key
Devices like this sometimes ask you to open an AI account and paste in your own key. It looks cheaper, and it looks like it keeps us out of your family's data. It would work — the technical part is straightforward. The case against it is legal and commercial, not technical, and it comes down to two things.
- Personal AI keys aren't licensed for this. Google's terms for individual developer keys bar using them in any service aimed at children. That restriction is about what the service is, not how old the account holder is — so a parent's own key doesn't get around it. Answering questions for children needs a commercial agreement written for that purpose, which is what we're putting in place, and it isn't something a personal key can offer. It also wouldn't move anything onto you: we'd still be the ones collecting and transcribing your child's speech, so the responsibility for it doesn't travel with the credit card.
- The free option trains on what your child says. Without a card attached, Google's terms let them use what's submitted to improve their products, and say human reviewers may read it. Given the choice, most people would pick free — and a child's questions would end up in a training set, where no delete button of ours could ever reach them.
So we pay for the answering on a commercial account, on terms that keep your child's questions out of anyone's training data, and pass the cost through as tokens.
If you stop paying, you still own a computer
Inside is a stock ESP32-S3 — a Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.43C, the same module anyone can buy. Not a locked board, not a custom chip that only talks to our servers. It has 8 MB of flash, 8 MB of PSRAM, two microphones, a speaker, a round AMOLED touch screen and a USB-C port.
Which means the failure mode of this product is not a brick. If you run out of tokens and never buy more, you are holding a fully functional, reprogrammable computer — one that plugs into USB-C and takes new firmware from the standard Espressif toolchain like any other dev board. Turn it into a clock, a step counter, a music player, a weather display, or a school project. That is not a loophole we forgot to close; it is a stock part we chose deliberately.
Three connected kids' devices have been switched off by their makers in the last fourteen months, and every one of them turned into a paperweight the day the servers went dark. We would rather you kept a computer than a souvenir. If we ever shut down, the hardware you paid for does not stop being hardware.
EARLY BATCH
Reserve a place.
We're building a small first run and filling places in the order they're claimed. $69.99 instead of $99.99 for the first 10,000, with a million tokens on the device and no subscription after it — nothing is charged now. If the date slips you'll hear it from us before you hear it anywhere else.
Signing up both reserves your place and creates your account — there is no password to invent and none to reset later. You'll get two emails: one when we set the price, one before the first run ships. Nothing else. We don't sell or share your address.
About Watima
Watima is a small voice device for children aged 5 to 11, made by DataBeeper LLC. A child holds a button and asks a question out loud; Watima answers in a sentence or two, pitched to the child's age, and then stops. There is no screen and nothing to scroll.
Parents sign in with Google to create the account that owns their device. We use Google Sign-In only to identify the parent — we receive their name and email address, and nothing else. That account is what pairs a device, sets how long a child's questions are kept, reads or deletes that history, and holds the token balance that pays for answering. Watima never asks for access to a parent's Google data.
Read the Privacy Policy for exactly what is collected and how long it is kept, and the Terms of Service for how tokens and the hardware work. Questions: hello@askwatima.com.