Watima
Give your child the
gift of curiosity.
Open source. Ages 5 to 11. Not for sale.
Watima is a push-to-talk voice assistant for children, and the code is public.
A child holds a button and asks. It answers out loud, then stops. Nothing answers until a parent pairs the device. The parent sets the child's age, reads every question, and can delete them.
View on GitHubOpen source. Not for sale. Clone it, deploy your own function, and flash a board.
THE PROJECT
What the code actually does.
This site is the explanation. The firmware, the Firebase function, and the parent dashboard are on GitHub. There is nothing to buy. You run it on your own board and your own project.
- The child holds a button No wake word and no screen to fall into. Let go, it answers in speech, then it is quiet.
- A parent pairs it first An unpaired device will not answer. Pairing is the consent. Removing the device withdraws it.
- Age sets the answer Five through eleven. A younger child gets a short sentence. An older one gets a longer explanation.
- The parent sees the questions The dashboard lists what was asked and what was answered. Clear the history whenever you want.
- Memory is a switch Off, a short session so follow-ups work, or thirty days you can read. Off stores nothing.
- Your own project, not a shared account The reference cloud is one Firebase project. The code is meant to be cloned and pointed at yours: your function, your devices, your dashboard.
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.
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 — Watima never writes 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 from the dashboard they run. That pairing is the 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 choose to keep.
- 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 deleted from your database.
- Answers stay short Length is capped on purpose, so it can't lecture or wander.
- No ads, and no usage log sent back here The firmware and the dashboard have no advertising. The device is silent unless the button is held. It does not report questions to this website. If the function you deploy calls a model, that provider processes the turn. The history stays in the database you run.
- This website doesn't track you either No analytics, no tag manager, no advertising pixels, no session recording — none of it, which you can confirm by viewing the page source. The only outside service this page contacts is Google Fonts, for the typefaces; I'd rather name it than claim a purity I don't have.
HOW IT WORKS
Ask, wait, listen.
- 1
Hold and ask
Press and hold the button. 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.
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 you get a notification, with the question that caused it, and the device can stop 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
- Board
- Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.43C
RUN IT YOURSELF
Self-host it. Don't point the device at Gemini.
The firmware talks to a function you deploy. The questions live in your database. A consumer Gemini chat, or a key pasted into the device, leaves a usage trail you do not control.
Why you should self-host
A hosted kids' assistant keeps the usage. Every question, the time it was asked, and which child asked it, sits in someone else's account. That is the thing to avoid. Clone the repo, deploy the function on your own Firebase project, and the history is yours. The parent dashboard reads that database. Delete it and it is gone from the place you run.
The answer still comes from a model. If you point the function at Gemini, that provider processes the turn. Self-hosting means no second party is keeping a record of what your child asked. You are.
The board is a normal 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 my 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.
It is not a locked product. It is a stock board that takes firmware from the Espressif toolchain, over USB-C, like any other dev board. Flash Watima, or flash something else: a clock, a step counter, a loudness meter. The repo is the project. The hardware was never the thing being sold.
Build instructions are in the repository:
View on GitHub.
Copy secrets.h.example, deploy your own function, and flash the board.
GITHUB
It's open source.
There is no waitlist and no price. The firmware, the Firebase function, and the parent dashboard are in the repository. This website is the explanation. Build it on your own project. Nothing here is for sale.
WHY THIS EXISTS
I built this for my son.
I'm Nishant Vyas. I have a ten-year-old, and he is relentlessly curious — mostly about cars, engines and Lego. Why one engine sounds different from another. What actually makes a car fast. Whether the thing he just built would hold together if it were real. One of our favourite things to do in the car is put Gemini on over Bluetooth and let him ask whatever he's wondering about. We do the same at home with our Google Home.
Those moments are the best part of my week. But I could never hand either of them to him and walk away, for three reasons.
They're always listening. A smart speaker sits there with its microphone open, waiting for a wake word. The data goes somewhere I don't control. I can't tell you what's kept, for how long, or make it go away. And they don't move — a Google Home lives on a kitchen counter, so the question has to wait until he's standing near it.
The obvious answer is to give him a phone. I don't want to. The screen is the whole problem: he'd ask one question and still be there forty minutes later.
So I built the thing I actually wanted. It only listens while a button is held — no wake word, no open microphone. It's small enough to carry into another room. And I decide what's kept and for how long, because I'm the one holding that switch, not a company.
To be straight with you: the answer still comes from a model. If that model is Gemini, Google processes the turn. What self-hosting changes is the record. The history is written by your function, into your database, and the dashboard you run is the only place that lists what your child asked. There is no Watima account watching usage.
So that is what Watima is: an open-source voice device for children aged 5 to 11. 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. Pairing, the child's age, and the question history live in the dashboard you run, on the Firebase project you deploy. This website does not take a sign-in, and it does not keep a copy of what a child asked.
The source is View on GitHub. Questions: hello@askwatima.com.