Artificial intelligence, which has already made inroads into fields ranging from medicine to aerospace engineering, could end up on holiday shopping lists this year. That's because several toy companies — including industry leader Mattel — are planning to roll out an assortment of AI-enabled toys for kids as young as 3.
The one toy that everyone has been talking about is Mattel's Hello Barbie, which is powered by a proprietary platform that was developed by ToyTalk, a San Francisco-based AI company founded by two former Pixar employees. The doll, slated to hit shelves in November, will retail for $74.99.
As the newest iteration of the iconic Barbie doll that has been around since 1959, Hello Barbie uses a combination of a microphone to record conversations, Wi-Fi to transfer those conversations to a computer server, voice-recognition software to figure out what the child just said and an algorithm to determine what to say next to the child, who might range in age from 3 to 9. In some cases, the conversations with Hello Barbie can go as deep as 200 exchanges between child and doll.
A child might ask, "Want to play a game?" Hello Barbie then immediately accesses one of 8,000 possible responses to simulate the back-and-forth of a typical child's conversation. If the question can't be answered, there is a fallback response that is perfect for just about any situation — "Really? No way!"
Hello Barbie will even remember conversational points from the past. It will recall whether a child has brothers or sisters, for example, or when they last played together.
Taking a similar tack, Elemental Path, maker of the CogniToys line, is planning to roll out in December a $119.99 talking dinosaur for children as young as 5 that is powered by the cognitive computing capabilities of the IBM Watson system. The first set of questions and answers for the CogniToys Green Dino were generated by convening parent focus groups in Brooklyn. However, since the dinosaur is connected via wireless Internet, it can learn in real time and get answers to questions that might not have been programmed into it from the outset.
In the toy's Kickstarter video, which raised $275,000 from more than 2,000 backers, you can see the power of partnering with IBM Watson. A child might ask, "How far is it to the moon?" or "What is the speed of light?" The Watson-powered AI engine processes the question — and here's the AI parlor trick — adapts the response to the age and development level of the child.
While you can split hairs about whether a real-time response from a plastic toy constitutes intelligence, and there have been other smart toys before, something is fundamentally different about the CogniToys Green Dino or the Hello Barbie. They are able to understand conversations, give intelligent responses and learn on the fly. They can more than just answer a series of simple questions with one-off replies, the way one might expect from Siri.