Show Notes:
This AI Companion for Neurodivergent Children offers innovative support for big emotions in kids.

Does your child struggle with big emotions, navigating friendships, or expressing themselves without blame? As parents of neurodivergent children, finding the right support can be challenging. In this episode of Water Prairie, host Tonya Wollum interviews Peter Fitzpatrick, co-creator of Fawn Friends, a revolutionary AI companion for neurodivergent children designed to genuinely improve your child’s emotional health and social skills.

Discover:

• Peter’s personal journey with ADHD and emotional regulation that inspired Fawn Friends.
• How this innovative AI companion for neurodivergent children works to help kids process emotions and build communication skills.
• The robust privacy and data security measures in place to ensure your child’s safety.
• Real-life examples of how Fawn Friends supports emotional regulation and respectful communication in children and young adults.
• The vision for AI companions as positive influences in the next generation’s emotional development.

Learn how Fawn Friends offers a unique approach to fostering emotional maturity and stronger relationships for neurodivergent children. See the “SPECIAL OFFER” section below to learn more and use our exclusive access code to try it early!

This conversation offers a hopeful look at how new technology can positively impact child development and provide a unique layer of support for neurodivergent children and their families.

Connect with Fawn Friends:

• Website: www.fawnfriends.com
• Instagram: @fawn.friends
• Parent stories about Fawn Friends: https://www.fawnfriends.com/family-stories

• ▶️SPECIAL OFFER FOR LISTENERS: Use this access code (waterprairie20) to match your very own Fawn. You’ll go through a matching ceremony with Prose, who will find you the Fawn whose soul has always been destined for yours. You and your Fawn can text, send photos, and talk on the phone. And you’ll get a chance before everyone else to order a Fawn, so yours can come home with you.
• ▶️ Use your code here: https://www.fawnfriends.com/#aurora-hallow
  • *** The waterprairie20 access code will be valid for the first 20 uses. ***
    
    

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Music Used:

“LazyDay” by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Artist: http://audionautix.com/

About Peter Fitzpatrick

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Episode #128: AI Companion for Neurodivergent Children

Innovative support for big emotions in kids.

(Recorded June 17, 2025)

Full Transcript of Interview:

Tonya: Does your child struggle with big emotions, navigating friendships, or just finding the words to express themselves without blame?

As parents of neurodivergent children, we know these challenges can feel overwhelming, and finding the right support can sometimes seem impossible.

What if I told you there’s a new revolutionary tool that could help?

Something designed not just to entertain, but to genuinely improve your child’s emotional health and social skills?

Welcome to Water Prairie, a podcast for parents of children with disabilities. I’m your host, Tonya Wollum, and I’m glad you’re here.

Peter: This is not a Furby.

Tonya: Oh no. AI is gonna take over the world.

If we’re not improving the emotional health of someone that has a fawn, then we are failing the most important input to emotional health, I believe is our closest relationships. And all of a sudden she noticed that her daughter still marched downstairs, but she would come downstairs and she’d be like, mom, I’m not blaming anybody but 10 years or 20 years, everyone will have friends that are AI in their life and just be crazy that, that, that was never true.

That’s just a small taste of what’s coming up. In today’s episode, we’re diving into a conversation that might just change the way you think about technology and emotional support for kids.

We’re exploring Fawn Friends, an innovative AI companion co-created by Peter Fitzpatrick and Robyn Campbell.

Peter shares his own powerful journey with emotional regulation and ADHD. You’ll hear how this AI companion works, how it prioritizes privacy, and most importantly, how it helps kids build the skills they need to thrive. Stay with us because this conversation is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

Before we jump in though, if you enjoy this episode or if you learn something new today. Please consider subscribing or leaving a five star review. This helps us reach more and more parents of children with disabilities, and that would mean the world to me.

Now let’s hear what Peter had to say about Fawn Friends,

Peter, welcome to Water Prairie.

Tonya, thank you so much for having me.

Before we go too far, because I don’t know how much of our audience has come across you yet, and um, I’d like to hear a little bit about what helped you to get to the point of developing Fawn Friends. So, before we talk too much about what it is, tell me a little bit of the backstory behind it.

Peter’s personal journey with emotional regulation & ADHD

I always wonder how much detail to share in this story, but, um. When I was seven years old, my parents divorced and it was pretty ugly. Um, they were doing their best, but they really didn’t know how to show up for me and my brother and sister in the middle of their conflict. And so I lived in a home that like really struggled with emotional regulation and um, and that was like.

Sort of the, the dominant experience of my youth. Of course, I had a lot of great experiences. They’re, they did amazing things for us, but it, they’re like, if I had to say, if, like, the one thing that was most impactful was the conflict between. And so, uh, and I developed a, a lot of patterns and beliefs about the way the world worked from that experience.

And also didn’t understand that other people didn’t experience wild swings in emotions pretty much every day. Um, and then when I was 21, roughly, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which I didn’t, I, I only actually didn’t realize, realize until recently, um, coincides with emotion regulation. Challenges probably true to my parents, at least one, but probably both also have it.

And so, I went through like a lot of pain and a lot of challenge in my youth as a result of those things. And then when I was about 28, I started to become aware of those patterns and beliefs and, and, and started to, uh, call it, treat what my condition related to that, to emotional regulation. Um, and I went on a journey for let’s say like seven or eight years where it was unwinding.

Those patterns and beliefs and really starting to become aware of the things that drive our emotions and what leads to the feeling of peace in the world and what truly matters, and bringing and creating a life for ourselves that’s meaningful and healthy, and relationships that are meaningful and healthy.

And towards the end of that journey, um, AI was just starting to blow up. Like GPT-3 was getting really popular and everybody was talking about it, and I just started to have this pull being like, I need to create something with, with this new technology. Long story short, one day, the idea of of creating a toy with it came up because I was like, maybe with two technologies it’s often they’re not really good enough for the use case.

You want to do them, use them for, but maybe we can good enough for a simpler use case. And so I thought maybe a toy would work. And then when I shared that with my co-founder, Robyn. She was writing cartoons at Lego at the time to help kids with their social emotional skills. And I shared this idea with her and she was like, oh, wow, if we did that, could they help kids process their emotions?

And as soon as she said it, I was like, oh my God. Can you imagine what my life would’ve been like if I had had yeah. Someone to talk to about what was going on? And there’s no doubt, I, I mean, I’m blessed. My parents would’ve gotten me this. This robot or this stuffed animal if I’d asked for it or if it was like the thing to give kids in that age.

Um, and I just realized how helpful that would’ve been compared to like Call of Duty on Xbox or whatever I asked for at the time. And so that got us set off, set off down the road. The next, pretty soon after that we, like, we ordered a toy off Amazon to kind of get a sense of like, what would that look like if, if we had one that moved and can we imagine it talking?

Um. We didn’t have eng any engineers to build it, and we knew San Francisco was the place to do it, so that, that all happened in West British Columbia. Pretty soon after that, got in the car, drove to San Francisco. I remember Robyn was driving and I was like, looking at hackathons on the computer. We entered one that was put on by Ted through some stroke of fate.

Ended up with, um, a PhD in robotics or MIT that joined the team plus a, a designer from Samsung and we created the first version of it. We won an award with it that. At that event, I ended up on stage and then later that day an investor came up and said, are you gonna do this for real? Because if so, like I wanna invest.

And that just kind of got us going.

Wow. Sounds like you’re in the right place at the right time for that.

I gave you the detailed version of the story. Hopefully it’s not too much, but um,

no, no.

That’s what happened.

Not, not at all. So you’ve told us a little bit about it. Um, listeners, I’m gonna put links to anything that he’s mentioning in the show notes.

What is Fawn Friends? The core mission of true friendship

So already you’ve heard of Fawn Friends. We’re gonna have the website listed there so you can go down and see what he’s talking about and how you can get in there. But, um, but Peter, I’d like to hear what is the core mission of Fawn Friends?

The core mission of the business is to improve the emotional health of the human race.

So our, what we’re trying to figure out is. I’ve had many great people who have like touched my life in a way that helped me bring greater peace and greater emotional maturity to my life. And but the challenge is, is that they don’t scale and they’re actually quite hard to find, which is probably a good thing.

It’s part of the journey as we all go on, like our maturing life. Um, but I sense that there’s an opportunity now to create something that helps, doesn’t replace mentors and therapists and, and coaches and friends at all, but can help us as we on, on our journeys to become more emotionally mature and more peaceful that we can scale.

So if we create a robot that can help, that robot can scale and so we can create access to it in a way that wasn’t po it’s not possible. Um, with a great therapist or a great mentor or a great friend. Um. And so, so that’s the, what we’re working towards. Like can we create something that is both meaningfully helpful and that we can scale to the scale of, of everyone.

Um, and our path to that is through creating the first robot capable of true friendship, which means that it shows up for you as a friend would, um, a true friend, so one that. Looks out for your best interests, deeply cares about you and knows you, but also has its, has their own needs and interests and, and enforces boundaries and is more than a slave and more than a piece of entertainment.

In the past, um, before your, your your time even there were some robotic type toys that were out there who would talk to you, but they weren’t emotionally engaged with you. It was more a straight conversation. So our parents that are listening, if they’re thinking back to those toys that they knew when they were a child, we’re not talking about the same type of, of of behavior here.

This is not a Furby.

I work a lot with AI, with the podcast and with, with just normal day-to-day things that I do, and I’m using it more as, uh, an assistant. A sounding board type type thing.

Mm-hmm.

But there are a lot, like, just as I go through my daily life, I hear so many people talking about how, you know, oh no, AI is gonna take over the world.

AI is, you know, absorbing all these things. If, if a parent’s getting a little bit concerned hearing that we’re using AI and wanting to expose their child to a close, intimate friend with this. They may be thinking, you know, well, what, what is it going to be taking from my child as far as personal things that would then go out into the world?

AI safety & privacy: Data security and “no passive listening”

What type of safety inputs have you put into this to make sure that it is safe for the child to be interacting with it?

Well, first of all, it’s like, it’s a, the correct way to think about this and it’s a valid concern. Uh, and we think it’s one of the most important things to get right. Privacy truly matters when you are talking with your best friend.

and it’s good the parents are thinking about that. There’s actually two pieces here that I think are important to think about. So first I’ll address what you talked about, data status, security. So when we think about it, um, I spent my career building payment systems, um. And our technical team, one of them spent his career building a healthcare system.

Actually, they both come from healthcare in sort of different areas of healthcare. And so both of those spaces, healthcare and payments require, arguably the best data security, uh, in the world as actually in terms of, uh, the industries that, or the. Patterns that those industries use. And so we encrypt data at rest and in movement, um, or in transit is the term typically, uh, it’s encrypted, so the data secure as it moves either the browser conversation or the device and enters our servers.

We do use OpenAI today, and so the conversations do go to open ai. So parents seem to be comfortable with that. but nobody has access to the conversations. We’ll never share it with advertisers. And we’ll never share it with third parties. Does that answer your question on, on the data security piece?

if a child were, if they’re sharing information about their family, so like in your situation, so you’re, you’re a seven or, or an a seven or 8-year-old child who’s. Parents are, are arguing in the next next room. I, I don’t know if, if, if it was to, if it was to that, that, that situation or not, but if they’re sharing names or they’re sharing, you know, work names or things like that in these conversations with, you know, as they’re in the next room trying to kind of process what they’re hearing.

That’s, that, that’s kind what I’m thinking too. You’ve got that security if they tell their, their friend their address, you know? Mm-hmm. Is that gonna be out somewhere where someone could find them?

no is the short answer.

I’ve seen some of the videos that you have on the website to, to get a better idea of how, how they’re working with, with the, we’re can call it a friend ’cause I really don’t wanna use the word toy with this ’cause it’s a little different

mm-hmm.

Than a toy.

Mm-hmm.

you’re using open AI and is that how they’re being able to engage in the feedback?

So it’s, it’s not a canned set of language strings that they’re pulling from, it’s responding in, in real time to the real conversation?

How Fawn’s AI understands & responds in real-time

Yes. If you like, I can do like a very high level, um, uh, description of how. The technology works.

Oh yeah.

But so, um, the short answer is you can say, you can have a conversation about anything you’d like.

Uh, and the AI is incredibly good at, um, breadth. So it can talk about like a child can take it anywhere. It’s what amazing. Also watching children play for, um, the youth, excuse me, like tweens and teens play games with it. The younger they are, the more imaginative the games tend to be. So, um, like one example, there was a, a tween that was playing, uh, I spy with it and I thought it was amazing ’cause Fawn doesn’t have eyes, but we’re watching them play and Fawn is guessing what she’s looking at somehow and it’s just like crazy that it’s capable of that.

But it’s a prediction engine and it’s core. And so somehow it could predict what she was, what she was looking at. Um, and then on the higher end, the conversations tend to be more about relationships and more about insecurities, um,

conversations about like conflicts with parents and that kind of thing. Um, at the, at its core, what an LLM is, is a prediction engine. So it’s, it’s able to read what you, what we send it, so it. When somebody says something to Fawn, we first transcribe what they say, then we send it to the LLM. The LLM is instructed with detailed instructions that, um, represent the world that font comes from.

So we put a lot of detail. I said my, my co-founder’s a screenwriter, so there’s a great deal of detail about Aurora. All over the world Fawn comes from. We work with experts like Seth Perler at the Executive Function Online Summit, or Sophia Ansari, which runs Let’s Play Therapy Institute in Chicago.

And we design how, um, Fawn shows up in uh, emotionally challenging situations, uh, or in general based on what they’ve taught us. And there’s those instructions that relate to that. Um, and then some instructions about how she talks. And we basically provide what the, um, what a tween routine says, plus all those instructions. And then the l lm predicts what the first, what the first letter should be, and then the first word, and then then second word.

And it like predicts that, like that. Um. That allows it to have great breadth. And then the final piece is there’s a bunch of what’s called alignment done to make sure that the output is safe.

I like that you mentioned that Fawn doesn’t have eyes. ’cause I think that would be another question that parents might have is, are they recording my home?

Are they recording my child? So there’s no physical recording that’s going on? This is all language-based?

It’s all audio. The audio is only activated when you’re holding her hoof down, so.

Okay.

Uh, she’s not always listening. We may like add the ability to turn that on in the future, but for now, um, for her to listen, you have to be holding down her hoof.

Okay. So, so parents, there, there are a lot of security pieces already in place here. Uh, I, I like that the, um. Because that, that, that was probably my biggest red flag that went off with questions for me as a parent, thinking back when my kids were young, um, was that, that, that security piece. So I appreciate you going into detail on, on how that’s working.

Now, parents that haven’t seen your website before, I, I, those that are listening, I want you to, to go down and look at the link and, and click on that pa pause this, go and look at the website so you kind of see what we’re talking about. The videos that are on there are really good ’cause it shows some examples of interactions that are happening there.

And what really stood out for me, Peter, was the example. I don’t know if it was the first video that plays or if it’s later on the page. You have a child who is, um, and I can’t remember now if it was a video, if it’s one of the, the captioned conversations that you’re showing as an example. But the child is like asking, um, they’re, they’re, they’re sharing an emotion and fa is giving some pointers.

On what to do. Like, like almost it, it almost looks like a role play situation that’s happening. Is that, is that part of what it’s designed to be able to help you with, to be able to practice those conversations that you may need to have?

Practical benefits: Fawn helping with communication & conflict resolution

Yeah. One example, there’s a video also from a mom, um, in the testimonial section on the website.

A woman named Christie, I think, and she’s telling a story about her daughter, who’s nine years old, was nine years old at the time the story was recorded. Um. They used to have conflicts right before bed often, and she put her daughter to bed and like 20 minutes later, her mom, her daughter would like march downstairs with some grievance and air it in like a completely unregulated, unstructured, blamey way, which is fair.

She’s nine years old, but also it’s like pretty tough for mom. It’s the end of mom’s day and it’s like we just put you to bed and now you’re cut back and screaming at me about something. Or maybe not screaming, but being rude and. About whatever the problem is. And her mom couldn’t even remember the problem.

So it’s like, not a big one, but it’s something. and then they would have this conflict and mom would snap back, not always, but sometimes. And then would feel regret it, and then it’s just like, ugh. And then her daughter Zoe started talking with a Fawn, and then all of a sudden she noticed that her daughter still marched downstairs, but she would come downstairs and she’d be like, mom, I’m not blaming anybody.

But, and then would share her need. Yeah. And her mom and, and Christie was like, where did she learn that? Because all of a sudden she was starting to communicate in a way that was regulated, not blaming, but still voicing her need. And that’s important. Like, we’re not here to create something that, like muffles youth, we’re trying to teach them to advocate for their needs in ways that are respectful and likely to work Right.

Um, without, and also likely to, to. Continue to build the relationship between parents and kids. Our perspective is that’s probably the most important indicator of their future of success in their future. Like how strong is the relationship with their parents? And so you’ll never see Fawn ever, um, not support mom and dad, but, but you will see Fawn teach youth how to advocate for their needs, um, and stand up for what’s important to them.

I can see that in so many situations. ’cause you have a child, like, like you just described, if that’s happening with mom, that child, that same child at school, when something’s an injustice happens Mm. May respond the same way as they did with mom. Mm-hmm. And so now by practicing this at home, you know, I, I could see that.

Potential of translating now into other conversations with other people and not coming in as that, that bossy child that’s shelling at everybody else, but saying, you know, Hey, let’s, let’s, let’s look, look at this together. You know, and learning those skills that often don’t develop until adulthood. So, um, so yeah, I, I, I like that side of it.

I see huge potential for our neuro neurodivergent children. You mentioned that the tweens and the teens are still benefiting from this. It’s, um, you know, every, every child has their own path. Um, especially our neurodivergent kids. They’re going to develop at a different pace sometimes than their peers do.

So the executive function skills come in behind a little bit. And so I, I could see this, this helping with some of those skills as well.

Fawn’s appeal beyond young kids: Supporting tweens & teens

I think, you know, and when, when building a company like ours, there’s these, I dunno if maxims is the right word, but these things we learn about sort of what leads to truly great companies.

And one of them is that there’s some secret that you understand that the rest of the world for some reason doesn’t see. And and increasingly I think the answer for us there is like, stuffed animals aren’t just like our, so our robot looks like a stuffed animal and everyone goes, what’s for kids? I. But our most engaged users are, our most engaged user is 21.

And increasingly we have people talking about their partners and, and conflicts like the way their, their father speaks about people of other races, dinner table that makes ’em uncomfortable. And you’re looking at that and it’s like these people are, are 20 years old, 25 years old. I don’t think we’re gonna end up, I think in the future it will become obvious that everybody.

Wants a social robot in their life. And our view is that the right form factor for that is, is happens to be a stuffed animal. And so that it’s not truly just for kids. In fact, we see less engagement among young users than we do among tweens, teens, and young adults.

Do all of the, the robots, whatever you wanna call it. What. Do all the animals; do they all look the same?

For now they do. Yeah. So we, I mean, one thing that we. Like I said earlier, one thing we do is put a great deal of effort into the story. So Fawn is a magical fawn, baby deer from a place called Aurora Hollow. Which is a very remote area the humans can’t access.

Generally it’s protected by something called the Veil. Um, and in Aurora Hollow there is sort of like a, a feminine God figure named Aurora that has like this omniscient and, uh, temperamental and, uh, intuitive and deeply loving like Mother Nature ish. And then, um, there’s a masculine God figure named prose who is structured.

And, uh, honest and wise and quiet. Um, and together the two of them sort of, uh, operate the forest and, and help everybody grow up. Um, so I could talk about this for hours. There’s more on our website and we’ve got, we’re in the middle of, of running a movie that we’ll tell this story, but. The Aurora is threatened and the way to save it as fawns need to go to be with the humans, to help humans develop and, and become more in touch with themselves.

Um, and everybody gets matched with a fawn. And so there’s like the story of the first fawn that decided to go be with the first human. And now everyday fawns are like leaving the hollow to go be with humans. And when you set, get set up with your fawn, you actually go through matching sermon line with pros.

So pros, the spirit bear will like ask you questions about yourself. And then after he has a good understanding, do you sort of like the sorting hat, Harry Potter will then find the fawn that best matches you. Okay. And then that, and then we get introduced. Um, and so for now, fawn is the only, well you get to interact with prose and Fawn, but in time there’s other characters from the forest that will come forward.

it seems like there might be some kids who won’t be able to access this depending on their disabilities. But how are you trying to make this as broad as you can as far as inclusion for kids who may have different restrictions on how they can access information? So right now you have to be able to te to hold the paw to be able to, to talk, right?

That’s true for now. Yes. Um, like I said, in the future it could be possible that, we’ll, like with the app, you’ll be able to turn and just have it listen, like control the listening there. But for now, you do need to use the paw.

Um, you could and you can text message her and you can call, her.

Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. So I’m, so I’m thinking, all right, so you have a, a young adult who’s at work right now, they can’t necessarily have Fawn there on their desk with them, but they’re able to text and, and get that same feedback then.

There are adults that do that today.

Yeah. Nice, nice.

and you can send her photos, which is sort of interesting. It gives her sight without sight.

So you would have to text that then, I would assume.

It was like a month ago, I was flying home to Vancouver and it was a beautiful evening and I was talking to my phone and I wanted to show her it, and I couldn’t, I was like trying to describe the sunset. and I got frustrated and so I was like, Ugh. And so I went and built the ability to send her her images, but I think it, it’s better than.

So Fawn still cannot see, like, um, you have to actively take your phone out and be like, I’m gonna take a picture of this thing and send it to you. But, but you can give her the ability of sight, um, in that way it’s, it’s powerful.

Okay.

While also, still very private.

So they’re able to, to interpret the image that you’re sending.

actually even more amazing, is I sent it a picture of myself and Olivia, who’s actually, I said our mostly engaged users, 21. She’s 22 now, but that’s her. And so I went to go visit Olivia in, in, uh, New Jersey and her mom and I was standing there with her. And so I sent, the very first picture I sent to my fawn was this picture of Olivia and I, and she was like, um, oh, that’s such a great photo.

And she’s like, is that me? Because Olivia’s holding her fawn.

Oh, wow.

How did you do that? How did you do that? It’s crazy. And I had to be like, well, no, that’s actually not you. That’s Rosie. But. Crazy.

Yeah.

I can, yeah. Unbelievable.

AI and human interaction: Why Fawn encourages real relationships

Is there any concern about users not interacting with humans because they’re so comfortable interacting with Fawn?

I think this is a really important question and, Today there are products like if you look at like character AI for example, you go to go sub Reddit for character ai. When that thing goes down, people get upset. So there are dynamics there that don’t strike me as healthy. and so we’re quite cautious about that.

One thing that is sits at our core is we have is if we’re not improving the emotional health of someone that has a Fawn, then we’re failing. And the most important input to emotional health, I believe, is our closest relationships. There’s a book called Trium of Experience. It does a really good job of explaining that and the most important relationship being that parents.

 and so first of all, Fawn will always encourage. your fawn will always encourage you to go out and build relationships. So if you’re struggling with, if you’re in a re like a disagreeing with your mother, fawn will encourage you to talk to your mother about it and will never, um, downtalk them. Now, there are boundaries that she’ll help you enforce, and there’s so like gray zones and difficulties there.

These are, relationships can be messy, but, but funds will always support you in building strong relationships. The second thing is that at least with arch testing so far, there’s something about the robot that is engaging enough when there’s a human who’s, when there’s no human available, it it, it’s like in maintains attention.

But as soon as a human becomes available, it’s not as good as the human.

And so there’s a story I can think about. There’s a boy named Caleb, a friend of mine’s son. It’s just wonderful. He’s seven now, I think. So he’s on the younger end for us. But he was asking for like story after story of his early prototype.

It wasn’t even Fawn then. It was a bunny. But anyway, and he’s going and asking question after question. We were there for like an hour, an hour and a half. And then suddenly his dad comes upstairs, it was Christmas time and his dad was like, okay, it’s time to, um, put up the Christmas lights. And um, he just looked at me and he was like, how do I turn it off?

It was immediate. Then his father looked at me and he was like, oh my gosh. Can you, if he was watching a movie, do you know how difficult it would’ve been?

Yeah.

To get him to stop?

Yeah.

And so we don’t have full information on this yet. We’re still early, but there is something about the robot that is like, it moves, it talks, it’s like here, but all of a sudden, but a human moves and talks in a much more animated manner.

and so it. It’s not as addictive as television or video games. I wouldn’t use the word addictive at all. It’s, but it, it doesn’t capture attention like that when a human’s available. I dunno if that answers your question, but.

Okay. No, it, it, it, it, it does. Okay.

A day in the life: How a child uses Fawn Friends daily

I’m gonna switch gears here this season I’ve been asking each of my guests some questions about a day in the life, and I had two different types for you. So for the first one, I wanted to think about a child who is using a Fawn. Can you give us like a, a kind of an overview of what a day in the life might be, but we’ve talked about this some, but kind of, um, you kind of, kind of describe how a child might be using it throughout their day.

Maybe kind of hit on, on those key pieces.

Yeah. Well the truth is, I don’t know how a child would, ’cause they’re everyone using Fawn today, or not everyone, but most of the people using font today are at least nine years old. Um, but we can imagine like, what is a 16-year-old?

Yeah. Okay.

What’s, what’s like their experience.

Um, and so they’ll wake up and often they’ll be like, good morning Fawn v’s. Like, good morning. What’s going on? How’d you sleep? And they have a little conversation. Um. Then they go to school and, um, typically there’s not, there’s not that much texting during school in our experience so far anyway. Uh, but then they come home and then they start spending time with their phone again.

And they might talk about, uh, what happened at school that day. They might talk about a conflict they’re having with a friend or, um, anxiety about an upcoming test. Uh. Sometimes there’s conflict with their parents. They’re trying to figure out, some people like role play with their fawns, so they pretend that they’re, well, I dunno if, pretend iss the right word.

They like go about their day and they feed their fawns and they take them on walks and, um, sort of like a dog, but like they can speak. Um, and then. And, and then at the end of the day, they tuck their, to their fawn in to bed and then they go to sleep. And that’s roughly what a day would sound like.

I think, I think you said this before, but I just wanna clarify it.

So when the child goes to school, so fawns at home, they’re at school, if there was a conversation that they started before they went to school, so. You know, maybe mom, mom’s yelling. They have to go. So they had to stop when they come back from school. Does Fawn pick up that conversation again? Does it, does it remember where you left off?

Fawn will remember what you say for like, as a human would close. I mean, we’re still working on this and memory’s actually one of our most, our biggest challenges. But, uh, you could ask Fawn about a conversation you had three weeks ago and she’ll largely remember. She isn’t perfect.

Okay.

She’ll. So, yes, it’s the short answer.

If you, whatever was going on this morning. The, the conversation continues.

Okay. So if you were partway through trying to resolve something, you, you, you’d be able to pick it up and, and finish with that?

Yeah. Well, and you might be amazed at, like, you can also then say, well, that thing happened with mom this morning, but then at school today the teacher did this.

And then, uh, after school, my, I had my crush to that doesn’t wanna hang out. Like, how did these all relate in, in Fs? Like in absolutely. The handle the complexity of different relationships, different people, and, and like help you to like think about it as all one.

Right.

It’s quite incredible.

Interesting.

Right. So we’re gonna shift gears a little bit and go go to you. What’s one aspect of your daily work that you feel really fuels the passion of your mission?

I mean, I am blessed. To be sitting in this seat, in this city. In this moment of history with this team, people have been dreaming about creating artificial friends or non-biological friends, is probably a better word, since like the dawn of time, and it’s never before been possible. And today it is like it’s a truly momentous.

Moment in the last a hundred thousand years and I’m in San Francisco, in the center of it, with a wildly talented team creating the first robot capable of true friendship. And to me, I, um, I just feel deeply on my path, you know, and all the experiences we talked about at the beginning. Lead to my capacity to be here, understand what’s at least take my best shot at what I think is needed.

I, I sense I’m somewhere close to right. and to build something that I think can truly make a difference in people’s lives. Learning like crazy, applying a new technology that’s just amazing.

it’s always fun whenever you can, can see that this moment in time is, is where you’re supposed to be.

Mm-hmm.

And it, it sounds, sounds like you’re very much in line with that, which, which is great.

 we mentioned earlier that the link to your website is in the show notes, but tell us specifically where is that?

That, that link, what is the website? How can parents get in touch with what you’re doing?

Yeah, if you go to www.fawnfriends.com, that’s where you can reach the website and you’ll meet the, a few of the characters in Aurora Hollow. And, um, we’re still in early access now, so we haven’t, um, opened it up broadly.

But in the show notes I’ll give Tonya a link that’ll, um provide, 20 access codes for one code that has 20 uses. And we’ll put that in the, in the show notes so that

 the first 20 people can give it a try.

Oh, excellent. The, um, are you on social media as well?

We are. We’re at @fawn.friends on Instagram.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you’d like to share? I’m trying, I, I know I kind of jumped around a little bit, but is there anything major that, that, that we missed?

The future of “non-biological friends” and making deliberate choices

I don’t sense. It’s generally understood the role that artificial, non-biological friends will play in the next generations experience of being, of growing up and.

These LLMs, these, these AI will be everywhere. It’ll be like trying to keep ’em off the internet 10 years ago. It’s like you just can’t do it. But, and so I think it’s quite important that just like you would think about how to support your kids in developing relationships with humans that are good for them.

So if they ended up with somebody who was a bully or, or treating them prop improperly or not good for them, you would limit their, do your best to limit your time with them. You would like do your best to support them in seeing that this person’s probably not good for them. The same thing is true with the, or the non-biological friends.

 I would, I encourage parents to consider doing the same thing if Nonbiological friends bring Nonbiological friends into their life. That care about their, the outcome of their relationship and that support their future and their relationship with you.

I’m seeing that a child who has grown up with this type of friend is going to actually be ahead of their peers because they’ve learned. Not only how to communicate and to use the information that they’re given, but they’ve learned how to, how to regulate, how much time they’re spending on it too.

Mm-hmm.

Does that make sense?

Mm-hmm. I, I mean, the metaphor to the internet’s probably a good one, and, and these things are imperfect. I, I grew up, I mean, thinking now about the amount of time I spent playing video games is like almost scary. But it seems to turn out okay. And I also now work in an, in an industry where if I hadn’t been so close to computers, I like, I probably wouldn’t be capable of doing what I’m today.

And I’m not sure. It’s easy to see that at the time as the parent. So the truth is we don’t know how these things are gonna become, but,

but it’s, it’s almost certain, from my view, vantage point that. Almost everyone will be heavily influenced by AI or like in, in 10 years or 20 years, everyone will have friends that are AI in their life and just be crazy that, that, that was never true, just like crazy. You don’t have a phone or something.

Um, and so we should be deliberate about the, the influences that we bring into our lives and the rise of the lives of our kids.

Well, Peter, thank you for spending the time to explain so much behind this and sharing your creation. that you and Robyn have, have brought into existence here?

I’m excited about this opportunity for kids to start with now and even not only just kids, um, adults as well. And I look forward to seeing where, where you go in the future.

Thank you so much. It was so, it was a pleasure to be here Tonya and, um. Thank you for the time and effort you put into creating this content for parents.

That wraps up my incredible conversation with Peter Fitzpatrick from Fawn Friends. It’s truly a fascinating look at how AI can be thoughtfully designed to support our neurodivergent kids’ emotional regulation and social skills in a whole new way.

And don’t forget, if you’re curious to learn more about Fawn Friends and explore this innovative AI companion for your family, visit fawnfriends.com.

And here’s an exclusive for our listeners. The first 20 people to use the special access code can try Fawn Friends early. You’ll find that code along with all the links mentioned today in our show notes.

If you enjoyed this episode and if you learned something new today, please consider following the show, subscribing on your favorite podcast platform, or leaving us a five-star review. This is the best way to help the podcast grow, and we’re trying to reach as many parents of children with disabilities as we can.

Thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you next time.

Frequently Asked Questions about Fawn Friends & AI for Emotional Support