Firstwords

Firstwords is a playful, terminal-based AI baby that learns language from you.

You type sentences. It remembers trigrams. Over time, it builds a vocabulary and starts talking back — starting with babble, gradually shifting to real words it's seen before. Every conversation is stored locally, so the baby's personality grows with yours.

It's part toy, part Markov-chain experiment, and entirely meant to be run in a terminal window for a few minutes of strange joy.

How it works

1. You type something.
2. Firstwords breaks it into trigrams (groups of 3 consecutive words) and stores them in a SQLite database.
3. The more unique words you teach it, the higher its maturity climbs (from 0% to 100%).
4. When responding, it looks at the last two words you said and tries to find a matching trigram. If its maturity is high enough, it uses a real word you've taught it. Otherwise — or if no match is found — it babbles a random made-up syllable.

So the baby literally learns to echo patterns from you, and the more you talk, the more "grown up" its responses become.

Prerequisites

• A C++17 compiler (Clang or GCC)
• CMake 3.14 or higher
• SQLite 3 (system-installed or via package manager)

All other dependencies are vendored:

• nlohmann/json — bundled as thirdparty/json.hpp
• SQLiteCpp — bundled at thirdparty/SQLiteCpp-3.3.3

Build

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/firstwords.git
cd firstwords
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

This produces a main executable in the build/ directory.

Usage

Run the executable:

./main

The database and vocabulary data are stored in:

~/Library/Application Support/Firstwords/

Note: This path is currently hardcoded for macOS. The project builds cross-platform thanks to CMake, but the data directory will need adjustment to run on Linux or Windows. Contributions to make this portable are very welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Once running, you'll see:

System: Baby is awake and listening... (type /night to leave)

You:

Type anything. The baby learns and responds. Type /night to quit.

You: hello little one
bababoo
You: how are you today?
meefla
You: I think you're learning
...

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions — whether it's porting the data path to other platforms, adding a persistent baby name, or making the responses weirder.

Check out CONTRIBUTING.md for setup instructions, coding conventions, and how to submit changes.

Acknowledgments

• utils.hpp functions generated with DeepSeek AI
• AutoSaveStorage.hpp generated with Google Gemini
• Built with SQLiteCpp and nlohmann/json