First it was Jeopardy!, then it was cancer, e-commerce and cooking. Now, IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence system is powering a line of connected toys.
And it looks as if people are impressed with the idea: A company called Elemental Path launched a Kickstarter campaign on Monday for a line of toy dinosaurs, called CogniToys, and had surpassed its initial goal as of Tuesday morning. The company was aiming for $50,000 and had raised more than $70,000 as of 11:40 a.m. Tuesday.
Essentially, the dinosaurs are connected toys that speak to IBM’s Watson cloud APIs, which the company began rolling out last year. According to the Kickstarter page, the CogniToys will allow children to engage with them by talking — asking question, telling jokes, sharing stories and the like. In addition, the page states, “The technology allows toys to listen, speak and simultaneously evolve, learn and grow with your child; bringing a new element of personalized, educational play to children.”
Elemental Path is not the first company focused on building natural language and artificial intelligence into toys. Possibly the best-known example so far is a startup called ToyTalk, which is building natural language iPad apps and was founded by former Pixar CTO Oren Jacob.
The evolution of artificial intelligence, and the ability to easily train toys, robots, apps or anything, really, is going to be a major focus of Gigaom’s Structure Intelligence conference September 22–23 in San Francisco. We’ll also talk a lot about machine learning and AI at our Structure Data conference March 18–19 in New York, where speakers from Facebook, Yahoo, Spotify and elsewhere will discuss how data in the form of images, text, and even sounds are allowing them to build new products and discover new insights about their users.
