AI Assist
Mimi Friends makes gadgets that help children learn and explore the world: cartoon speakers, digital microscopes, headphones. If a brand offers families smart devices, it would be odd to work the "old way" internally, with paper notebooks and endless spreadsheets. So, step by step, Mimi Friends is adopting smart solutions in its own operations too. Here is the first of them.
Technology — in products and in processes
A kids' gadget must be simple: switch it on and it works, no 20-page manual. You want the same from the team's internal tools. The most routine always lives in accounting: supplier payments, ads, delivery, returns, small purchases. While everything is done by hand, part of the expenses simply gets lost, and the month-end reconciliation turns into detective work.
The team decided to remove this chaos — and started with accounting.
The solution: a Telegram bot that counts for the team
We set up a bot right in Telegram, because the team is in it all day anyway. It logs company expenses and income from any convenient message and, best of all, requires no "correct format." It works several ways at once:
- By voice — dictate an expense on the go, for example during a trip or at an expo.
- By text — briefly write what for and how much.
- By screenshot or photo — send a receipt or a payment screenshot, and the amount lands in the ledger by itself.
It sounds trivial, but the small things are exactly what break accounting: when you have to "sit down and enter it all into a spreadsheet," it gets postponed, then forgotten. Dropping in a voice note or a photo of a receipt takes ten seconds, and nothing gets lost.
The result in practice
No loud numbers — it simply became calmer:
- No receipt disappears — everything is in the system at once.
- It's clear where the money goes on any day, not just at month's end.
- The team doesn't spend evenings transferring receipts into spreadsheets.
- Manual routine dropped noticeably.
More on how such tracking works in our piece on an AI Telegram bot for expense tracking.
What's next: faster answers for parents
The next thing we're working on concerns customers. Work is underway on an AI assistant for the support chat. We want parents to get instant answers to routine questions — how to connect a speaker, what a microscope can do, which gadget suits a child of a certain age, where an order is — instead of waiting for a manager. Parents often write in the evening, once the kids are asleep, and that's exactly when a fast answer is especially welcome. Complex inquiries will still go to a human — the assistant only removes the queue of identical questions.
Bottom line
The less time routine eats, the more is left for the main thing — making gadgets for kids that truly inspire. Mimi Friends has only started this path, but the direction is already paying off.
If your business also wants to remove manual routine or speed up support — get in touch. We'll show how it works on your own processes.
