Toy is Powered by IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence

 Gadgets  

Start-up company Elemental Path is crowd funding their new CogniToys dinosaur.  The toy taps into the IBM Watson cognitive computing cloud to power speech recognition and provide an educational conversation for children.

Watson vanquished his opponents on Jeopardy! four years ago.  Since then, the technology behind the IBM artificial intelligence platform has evolved and been tweaked to work for medicine, investing and other commercial projects.

"Thanks to the power of IBM's Cognitive Computing Engine, Watson, Elemental Path is creating the next generation of toys and changing the way kids learn and play."

Now, a start-up company called has Elemental Path has launched a Kickstarter funding drive to build a toy dinosaur toy powered by Watson.

The toy project is named CogniToys, has already doubled its initial goal of raising $50,000. For the Kickstarter release, this means the dinosaur will also be available in a variety of colors.

The plastic dinosaur uses speech recognition techniques to carry on conversations with kids, and according to project founders, Don Coolidge and JP Benini, it will develop a kind of smart personality based on likes and dislikes listed by each child. "What if a toy could grow with a child?" the developers asked.

It is similar to the Amazon Echo in function, but packaged as a child-friendly character, that talks with a dinosaur-like growly voice.

According the Elemental Path website, the company intends to produce toys that not only provide entertainment but deliver personalized engaging experiences. "Thanks to the power of IBM's Cognitive Computing Engine, Watson, Elemental Path is creating the next generation of toys and changing the way kids learn and play."

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The toy plays games with the child around educational topics like spelling, vocabulary, math and geography. It then takes what it learns from these conversations, and from what parents tell it about their children during an initial setup, and incorporates it into those games.

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.

Coolidge, began 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.”

Elemental Path hopes to one day license out its technology to the traditional toy makers.“We could have a Dora the Explorer that uses the same tech, and speaks in Dora’s voice,” Benini told re/code.



SOURCE  Wired

By 33rd Square

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