ChooChoo the Dragon introduces a new class of reading companion built for the way children learn today. Instead of playing prerecorded lines or relying on simple triggers, ChooChoo holds real back-and-forth conversations that strengthen vocabulary, comprehension, and emotional awareness. It pauses at the right moments, asks thoughtful questions, listens closely to the child’s response, and adapts the entire reading experience in real time.

This is possible because ChooChoo is powered by Agora’s newest on-device AI, designed for instant speech understanding and low-latency interaction. The result is a

smarter, warmer, more personal experience that feels closer to a patient tutor than a toy. It supports shy children with gentle prompts, encourages curious children with deeper questions, and helps anxious children by recognizing tone and offering reassurance.

For parents, the breakthrough is simple: ChooChoo shows how AI companions are moving beyond screens and into real-world learning tools. It blends research-based dialogic reading with responsive AI behavior, turning story time into an engaging, confidence-building routine that evolves with every session.

ChooChoo the Dragon is designed to feel less like a toy and more like a warm, attentive reading partner. Powered by Agora’s newest AI, ChooChoo listens in real time, understands a child’s speech, and adapts instantly to keep the experience natural and engaging. There are no complicated setups. A child turns ChooChoo on, chooses a story, and the conversation begins.

Here's what makes it special:

• Real back and forth conversations. ChooChoo uses dialogic reading methods so story time becomes an active conversation instead of passive listening.

• Thoughtful pauses and questions. It stops at meaningful moments to ask questions such as “What do you think happens next” or “Why is Milo feeling nervous.”

• Listens and adapts on the spot. ChooChoo hears the child’s response, adjusts its pacing, changes its tone, and tailors the direction of the story.

• Vocabulary in context. New words are introduced naturally inside the story, explained in simple kid-friendly language, and repeated later so children remember them.

• Gentle comprehension checks. ChooChoo makes sure the child understands characters, emotions, and cause-and-effect without creating pressure or testing.

• Emotional language support. It helps children identify feelings, express emotions, and practice empathy by noticing tone and responding with encouragement or reassurance.

• Minimal screen time. The small belly screen shows visuals such as story art, characters, or key words. It keeps the experience playful and hands-on.

• Ages three through six. Designed specifically for early language development and beginner reading skills.

• MSRP. $129 USD

• Optional parent app. Parents can review progress, vocabulary learned, comprehension trends, and areas where support might be needed, without sitting in on each session.

ChooChoo uses Agora’s newest device AI architecture to process speech, understand tone, and personalize reading in real time without using a smartphone or a constant cloud connection. This allows the interaction to feel instant, responsive, and natural, giving children a smoother and more confident reading experience.

Agora is powering the next wave of AI companions by giving manufacturers a complete, ready-to-use foundation. Companies no longer need to stitch together hardware, software, sensors, and AI models on their own. Agora provides a unified system that handles the complex work behind real-time listening, speaking, sensing, and interaction. This lets manufacturers focus on building personality, behavior, and user experience while Agora’s technology handles everything underneath. The result is faster development, lower risk, and AI companions that feel smoother, smarter, and more responsive right out of the box.

1) Convo AI Device Kit R2

This is the foundation manufacturers use to build AI companions from the ground up.

Instead of stitching together hardware, software, connectivity, and AI on their own, companies start with a complete, ready-to-use system. The Device Kit combines voice, vision, sensors, displays, motion, and global connectivity into one platform built specifically for AI companions.

It can hear voices clearly, see faces through its camera, sense touch and movement, show expressions on screens, and respond with light and motion. All of this happens together, in real time, so the device feels present instead of delayed.

Because the hardware is modular, manufacturers can turn a prototype into a real product faster and with less risk. They spend less time solving hardware problems and more time designing personality, behavior, and user experience.

In short, this kit turns AI companions from ideas into products that can actually ship.

2) Conversational AI Engine

This is what makes the conversations feel natural.The Conversational AI Engine helps AI devices understand what people say and respond right away, even in noisy places or on poor networks. It supports any AI model and any voice, so manufacturers aren’t locked into one system. The engine handles listening, speaking, interruptions, and timing so conversations don’t feel slow or awkward. It also supports expressive AI avatars, where speech, voice, and facial movement stay in sync. This helps AI companions feel more human and easier to connect with. For users, this means the AI feels attentive. For manufacturers, it means real conversation without having to build it from scratch.

3) AOSL (Advanced Operating System Layer)

AOSL is an open standard initiated by Agora and fully open-sourced, publicly shared on GitHub. By defining a universal interface between operating systems and chips, it effectively shields the underlying differences among various chips and operating systems. This allows developers to focus on application-layer innovation without needing to adapt to complex hardware and system fragmentation issues, providing unified support especially for embedded scenarios such as RTOS.

Through its open-source and open model, AOSL significantly lowers the barrier to innovation for deploying AI on hardware, accelerating the growth of a more vibrant hardware innovation ecosystem. It enables chip manufacturers and device developers to integrate capabilities like Voice AI more easily and rapidly, driving the productization process from "one-off customization" toward a "reusable and scalable" collaborative ecosystem.

We look forward to working with developers, chip manufacturers, and ecosystem partners to jointly advance the development and evolution of the AOSL standard, so that it may gradually become the infrastructure connecting hardware and intelligent applications in the AI era. Together, we can shape an open, collaborative, and efficient future for the industry.

1) Luka

A globally deployed AI reading companion already used by millions of families. It recognizes physical books and reads them aloud with expressive, interactive narration.

2) Lookee

A physical, always-connected AI companion designed for daily use. It recognizes faces, responds with motion and expression, and works reliably across home, office, and mobile environments using 4G.

3) Pophie

An emotion-aware AI companion built for natural interaction. It responds to visual and emotional cues and develops personality over time through memory and expression.

4) Fuzozo

An expressive AI companion focused on emotion and presence. It blends voice, motion, and behavior to create interactions that feel responsive and personal.

5) LuwuDynamics

Cross-dimensional embodied AI desktop companions that bring virtual characters into the physical world.

Powered by the BK7259 high-compute chip, LuwuDynamics’ flagship desktop robot pet combines large-model intelligence, long-term memory, and an emotion engine with a five-degree-of-freedom mechanical body. It delivers deeply personalized interaction through expressive gestures, real-time facial animations, and evolving personality—blending productivity, companionship, and IP-driven character experiences into a living, emotional AI presence on the desk.

6) Lgenie

An AI companion centered on personalization and emotional awareness. It adapts over time, building familiarity through ongoing interaction.

7) Maxevis

Expressive robotics platforms that synchronize perception, motion, and conversation. Designed to interact smoothly with people in physical environments.

Agora was founded in 2013 by Tony Bin Zhao, a veteran engineer who previously worked at WebEx and served as CTO of Chinese social media platform YY.com. He saw the same problem everywhere. Developers wanted to add high-quality, real-time voice and video to their products, but the infrastructure required to do it well was complex, costly, and fragile when built from scratch.

As mobile and web apps evolved, real-time interaction became essential. Voice, video, and live engagement were no longer nice-to-haves. They were core features. But existing VoIP stacks and network architectures weren’t built for large-scale, many-to-many interaction, especially across unpredictable mobile networks. Performance suffered. Latency crept in. Reliability broke down.

Agora was built to solve that gap. The team created a Real-

Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service with simple SDKs and a globally distributed software-defined real-time network. This allowed developers to embed real-time voice, video, and interactive broadcasting directly into their products, without owning or managing the underlying infrastructure. What once took years of engineering effort could now be deployed quickly and run reliably at scale.

At its core, Agora was founded to remove friction. It made real-time communication accessible, scalable, and dependable for any developer or business, across industries like social platforms, gaming, education, telehealth, and beyond. Instead of rebuilding the same complex systems again and again, teams could focus on what mattered most: creating engaging, real-time experiences that work everywhere.

Tony Bin Zhao, Founder and CEO

Tony Zhao is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Agora. He founded Agora in 2014, with a vision to provide high-quality voice and video as a ubiquitous platform to developers and businesses around the world. Previously, Tony was CTO and board director at YY.com (NASDAQ: YY), one of the world’s first video-based social network and live streaming apps with over 300 million users.

From 1997 to 2004, he served as a founding engineer at WebEx Communications Inc., where he developed the audio and video technology for the industry’s first web collaboration solution. WebEx was acquired by Cisco in 2007 for $3.2 billion.

Tony Wang, Co-founder & CRO

Tony Wang is Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Agora, a Communications-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) provider which delivers mobile-first, real-time communications for developers and businesses globally. Agora is on a mission to change the way the world communicates.

Tony leads global sales, strategy, management, go-to-market strategy, and team development for the company. Early in his 20+ year-long career, Tony was a Senior Developer with InfoSearch, the first publicly traded search engine marketing firm. A passion for startups and entrepreneurship inspired him to co-found the global marketing tech consulting group Infinite Nine, and later the award-winning pan-European eCommerce SEO agency BlueGrass Interactive. Tony earned a BS of Computer Science from Purdue University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.