CogniToy
Don Coolidge and JP Benini are bringing supercomputer smarts to the world of children’s toys.
Coolidge and Benini just launched a Kickstarter for a toy dinosaur toy driven by IBM Watson, the machine learning service based on the company’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer.
Developed under the aegis of a company called Elemental Path and a project called CogniToys, this tiny plastic dinosaur uses speech recognition techniques to carry on conversations with kids, and according to Coolidge and Benini, it even develops a kind of smart personality based on likes and dislikes listed by each child.
The toy is another example of online machine learning pushing even further into our everyday lives. This is made possible not only by an improvement in AI techniques, but also by the ability to readily deliver these techniques across the net. The CogniToys dinosaur connects to a Watson cloud computing service via the internet. “If we had relied on doing all this with the hardware,” says Coolidge, “it would have become a really expensive toy. It would be unaffordable.”
Parents connect the toy to a home Wi-Fi network, and then they input some details about their child, including such things as age, grade level, favorite color, sport, or food. This helps the toy interact with the child, but using Watson, it can also evaluate a child’s ability and skill level on its own.
“If your kid is, say, using new vocabulary words, we can bump up the skill level on the assessments to push the child further,” Coolidge says. A child in the first grade, he says, would use the toy differently from someone in the second grade.
For Coolidge, who started developing the toy as part of Watson-centic contest sponsored by IBM, the added benefit with this internet-powered toy is that his company can continue to improve the toy after it’s in the hands of kids. “Just like app developers,” he says, “we’ll be able to respond to user feedback and make the product better.”
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