Cognitoys: IBM's smart self-learning toy with intelligence

Supercomputers can work not only for the benefit of science, but also serve as a means of entertainment. The other day, Elemental Path introduced a new line of CogniToys toys that can understand their owners and communicate with them. So, IBM Watson is responsible for the intelligence of the toy : the toy dinosaur is connected to the "cloud" in which speech recognition and analysis of the data received by the toy is made for its subsequent "training".

As a result, a toy dinosaur recognizes its owner, remembers many preferences of a child, including color or a favorite toy, can joke and answer a wide range of questions of small “whys”.

At the same time, the toy keeps statistics of issues, and also evaluates the achievements of small owners. Special statistics are kept for parents in the CogniToys cloud service - in real time, the interests of the child and his success in studying a particular issue are shown. In addition, parents can limit the range of questions that a dinosaur can answer (meaning the so-called parental control).

Key features of Cognitoys:

The ability to speak and answer questions A

dinosaur can answer thousands of questions, giving answers that a child can understand. The toy takes into account the age of the child and will try to process the data in such a way as to give an answer that the child will understand precisely this age. The question “why is the sky blue” will not be answered, including words like “scattering of light radiation with a certain wavelength”;

Tells jokes, reacts to jokes of the child;

He learns, over time, the toy has its own "personality", which is developed when communicating with the child.



Connecting to the Network The

toy is connected to the Internet, to the IBM Watson cloud service.

Personalization

Each toy, as it communicates with the child, develops an individual approach that includes the preferences of the child, its features, and interests. The toy learns about the child’s favorite color, favorite toys and other data.

Education The

child does not just play with the dinosaur, but also receives a lot of interesting information. The toy itself has a very large set of educational functions, including mathematics, teaching words, poems and more. The plus of the toy is that learning is interactive.

How it works?

To start the conversation, the child must click on the large button located on the dinosaur’s tummy. After that, you can start communication.



Developers are now raising funds on Kickstarter , with much more than planned. It is worth noting that a year ago, developers won the IBM Watson Mobile App Developer Challenge, offering a unique idea for a self-learning toy connected to a supercomputer. Now this idea has received support from IBM, and the developers will soon introduce the first batch of “smart” dinosaurs.