What is green, very small, sounds like Yoda, and boasts boundless wisdom? The answer is Yoda. However, Yoda now has some competition on all fronts from Elemental Path’s CogniToys, little talking-and-listening dinosaur bots that tap into IBM Watson for their brains.
We covered CogniToys earlier this year when its Kickstarter campaign launched, but now the toy is heading into production and available for preorder for $120. It’s sort of a hybrid between Musio and an Amazon Echo, except with a major advantage in the intellect department: A kid can have a conversation with none other than Jeopardy champion and aspiring doctor IBM Watson itself.
Well, sort of.
“For privacy reasons, the toy doesn’t directly connect to Watson,” says JP Benini, co-founder of Elemental Path. “It connects to our proprietary platform, which in-turn connects to Watson for Q-and-A statements. Our platform is where we keep the personality, all the stories, the jokes, all the educational exercises and personalized experiences... We use Watson as the logical left-brain to our creative right brain.”
In order to make the toy work, you need to connect each CogniToy to the Web via Wi-Fi with an iOS or Android app that works as a gateway. There’s a button on each dinosaur’s belly that engages the microphone and mainlines Watson: Conversations, spelling and math quizzes, knock-knock jokes, that kind of thing. Parents can also customize each toy’s settings and set the kid’s interests within the app.
According to Benini and co-founder Donald Coolidge, Elemental Path’s platform serves to curate data tailored for each child. That database of responses is meant to answer common questions—”mommy questions,” as Benini and Coolidge put it—in the five-to-nine age range, such as “why is the sky blue?” and “why can’t I eat candy for dinner?”
While the project was funded via KickStarter, CogniToys was spawned out of a deeper relationship with IBM Watson. The toy won grand prize in the 2014 Watson Mobile Developer Challenge and earned a partnership with IBM to develop the technology further.
“The KickStarter campaign was a great way to inform and education the general public,” says Coolidge. “(It) provided us with a tool to speak directly to our early adopters about how the toy should look, feel, and act.”
This gen-one device is just a toy—and given its voice, a semi-disturbing one—but this kind of in-home interaction with a powerful A.I. engine like Watson certainly has use cases beyond kids. Benini and Coolidge mention Chef Watson, a cooking app developed in a partnership with Bon Appétit that uses the magazine’s recipe database to come up with new flavor-optimized dishes (Note: Bon Appétit and WIRED are both published by Condé Nast).
“The base technology is about giving connected devices a personality that responds and changes over time,” says Coolidge. “The toy makes for a very compelling version one. Flat fact retrieval is a neat trick, but the really powerful piece of the puzzle is the conversational nature.”
