I Built the AI App I Couldn't Find for My Own Kid

My son didn't ask me about Santa. He Googled it. Got his answer. And just like that, a whole chapter of his childhood was over.

I wasn't angry. I wasn't even surprised, really. But I remember sitting with that feeling and thinking: this is just the beginning. Every question he doesn't bring to me, he's going to bring somewhere else. And wherever that somewhere else is, it's going to answer him — confidently, completely, without knowing anything about who he is or what he's ready for. And he is going to believe it over me.

The problem I couldn't ignore

AI is that somewhere else now. Only faster, more convincing, and a lot harder to avoid than Google. A capable AI that a child trusts will answer questions I haven't thought to prepare for yet. I wanted to be in that conversation, even when I wasn't in the room.

In the 8–12 window, you're still close. They still tell you things. You still have influence over what they're exposed to and how they make sense of it. Then they're teenagers, and the window is smaller. I wasn't willing to lose that window to a tool that didn't know my son was 8, didn't know what our family believes, didn't know what I'd say if he came to me with the same question instead of typing it into a chat box.

So I started looking. And what I found was not reassuring.

There was no safe on-ramp

My son was 8 when I started paying close attention. Curious the way 8-year-olds are — about everything, all at once, without a filter. That's childhood. The problem was that every tool available to him was built for someone else entirely.

ChatGPT, Gemini, the ones his classmates were already using — built for adults. Not redesigned for kids, not calibrated for a developing brain. Just adult tools, pointed at children. No parental visibility. No age-adaptive responses. No understanding that a question about death means something very different coming from an 8-year-old than from a 35-year-old. And the worse part, everything contradicted the values we were trying to teach him.

The "kid-friendly" alternatives weren't much better, they weren't really built for him either. Most of them were aimed at preschoolers. Bright colors, simple words, nothing that would challenge a curious 8-year-old for more than five minutes. My son didn't want a toy. He wanted ChatGPT. He wanted the real thing, the thing his friends were using, the thing that could actually keep up with his questions. And I understood that — I just wanted a version of it that wasn't built for a 35-year-old or a 4-year-old. Something in the middle. Something that knew he was 8, that he was smart, and that some questions still needed guardrails around them.

That thing didn't exist.

So why did I build it instead of waiting?

Because it didn't exist, and someone was eventually going to build it. The question was whether that person would be a parent.

I'm a parent. I'm also someone who spent years building products in regulated, high-stakes environments for people who couldn't afford for them to fail.

HeyOtto was built with real safety infrastructure: age-adaptive responses built into how Otto thinks across developmental ages, real-time content monitoring system, and a parent dashboard with tiered alerts. In early 2026, we submitted HeyOtto to the KORA benchmark — the Kids Online Risk Assessment, an independent child safety evaluation framework — and scored 95%, the highest publicly reported score for any children's AI platform tested to date. That number isn't marketing. It's a methodology you can read at heyotto.app/kora.

We built what I was looking for. An AI I can hand to my own son without that quiet uncomfortable feeling that I'm doing something I'll regret. An AI that can be personalize to be an extension of me, how I parent and display the values we hold at home.

What I want other parents to know

You're not behind if you're still figuring this out. Most parents are. AI moved fast and nobody sent us a manual.

But the tools your child has access to right now were not built with them in mind. The companies that built them would probably say the same thing if you asked directly. They built general tools for general audiences. Your kid is not a general audience.

You deserve something built for your family. So do your kids.

That's what HeyOtto is. That's why I built it. And that's why I'm still here at 11pm, after three kids are finally in bed, making sure we keep getting it right.

Natalie Gibson is the founder and CEO of HeyOtto, a COPPA-compliant AI platform for children ages 8–18. She has spent her career building technology in privacy and security-regulated environments. HeyOtto is based in Atlanta, GA.

Try HeyOtto free — no credit card required →