7 ms·

Siri in a Teddy

31 points by singularity2001 13y ago

aaronsnoswell 13y ago
This has got to be a scam. 1) The KS video is completely gimmiky 2) The voice of the bear is (as pointed out by akandiah) completely non-child friendly. 3) They're claiming they can get this tech to market for 99 pounds a piece, yet don't divulge any real technical information at all. 4) I'm not even convinced the talking in the video was genuine. I really hope I'm wrong, but if I'm not, I really hope the KS staff catch this one in the bud.
- ctz 13y ago
  I don't think $99 as a price point for a bear with an single DOF animitronic mouth and some dumb control hardware is unreasonable.
  - chiph 13y ago
    Agreed. Teddy Ruxpin cost more (even in 1980's dollars) because it had eyes that moved as well as the mouth. Plus it had (depending on version) a cassette tape player or a digital cartridge player in it, instead of using an existing smartphone.
- donpdonp 13y ago
  The video is very misleading. The concepts and timing and inflections in the videos conversation are light years beyond what I've seen with off the shelf smartphones and software. I imagine the actual doll will be no better at conversations than Siri is, which is not a conversation at all. I dont think it has to be a scam - it could be essentially a bluetooth headset that provides a microphone and speaker in teddybear form, with some extra motors to actuate the mouth when playing audio. The idea of a supertoy is exciting as presented in the film "AI".
- DanBC 13y ago
  It's Teddy Ruxpin, but instead of "reading" cassette tapes it has a space for a smartphone. The (user supplier) smart phone does all the work. Except, even then, chatbots are hopeless and even Siri is often weird and sub-optimal. I get terrible results from normal questions. I speak with children. They have wondrous, amazing, confusing, marvelous, off-the-wall ideas. If anything can make a computer fail a Turing Test it's the questions of a child.
morsch 13y ago
Listen guys, if you're shipping for free within the UK, I'm not paying 20 GBP to ship to Germany.
- X4 13y ago
  Just curious, why?
- ronaldx 13y ago
  Understand your point and shipping on Kickstarters is often ill-considered. But, please bear in mind that this is one way that the UK is not very well joined up with the rest of the EU: International shipping from the UK is awkward and expensive compared to domestic shipping (at least in small volumes) - for example, it's unlikely the local Post Office in Abergavenny would even handle an international parcel of this size and weight. The ultimate difference in cost is probably >10GBP from the quotes I can find on parcels of an appropriate size and weight, although it's difficult to say.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - singularity2001 13y ago
    > bear in mind punny ;)
belorn 13y ago
How good is Siri-like programs when dealing with young children. Can it handle sentences with broken grammatical structure, or badly pronounced words?
po 13y ago
Hmm.. I wish people would stop thinking that what children need from a teddy bear (or any other doll-like toy) is more realism. Dolls are supposed to be for the child to project their own fantasy onto, not a portal into the internet. I'd rather have my child (if I had kids) speak to the PCB or phone or TV or whatever directly and leave the teddy bear to say whatever they dream it does. Maybe I read too much Calvin and Hobbes growing up. That being said, I do think that in the future we're going to have to start learning to be comfortable talking with computers.. so maybe this is a good thing. Not sure how I feel about this stuff now that I think about it.
- skore 13y ago
  > Dolls are supposed to be for the child to project their own fantasy onto[...] And not to forget: Dolls are most often initially "brought to life" by parents when playing with their children. They can form a vital path of communication and conveying of culture between parent and child. You could argue that the parent talks to the bear and the bear talks to the child. But seriously now - I don't want Siri between me and my child, thank you. Also - I don't want my child to be constantly affected by me. The good thing about a lifeless teddy bear is that they find out that they can change it, completely. If the Siri Bear is molded by me, initially, this now means that the degree to which it is able to be molded by the child is determined by the Siri Bear, not by the child.
  - bargl 13y ago
    As a guy who is about to be a father, holy shit by the way, I appreciate this perspective. My first thought to this bear was, aww that's nice but I don't want one. Now it's more of, oh man I can see how the ramifications of something like this haven't quite been thought all the way through. What if this stifles the creativity of my child because it is too responsive? Or maybe it boxes them even more into an antisocial atmosphere. I just don't know, but I'll wait until the research has caught up with the technology. If there's one place I'm a luddite it's with regards to the rearing of children.
    - skore 13y ago
iuguy 13y ago
If you want to get an idea of what the voice capabilities of the toy might be like, the developers made an Android-based chatbot called Jeannie[1] that you can play with. [1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pannous.voice.actions.free&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pannous.vo...
- skore 13y ago
  I don't know how the video demonstration compares to Siri because I have never used it, but even if its performance is similar to Siri, the lag in that video is truly horrible. It would be especially horrible for a toy that is supposed to talk back. Imagine every human you talked to had a 6 second ping. "Bear, do you like me?" One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi. "Yes, I like you."
davidw 13y ago
Ok, I'll be that guy: "In a teddy bear" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_%28garment%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_%28garment%29
- drharris 13y ago
  Ok, I'll fess up that this was my first thought too.
  - benjamincburns 13y ago
    Likewise. Although I quickly realized they were talking more "the bear from AI" than "the actress who played Siri on The Big Bang Theory."
    - karlkatzke 13y ago
      Me three. Although I didn't think of the Big Bang Theory connection, I thought of Apple's Siri and wondered if it was some sort of fan art with a mildly nsfw theme.
      - saw-lau 13y ago
        Likewise - extremely disappointed (although looking forward to setting browser to 'Teddy' this evening...).
- ynniv 13y ago
  A living example of a title that should be re-written by the moderators. ("Siri in a Teddy")
fbomb 13y ago
That's not what I had pictured at all ;-)
akandiah 13y ago
The voice (and the attitude) doesn't seem to be child-friendly. It's almost as if the makers were trying to re-create "Ted".
- therobotking 13y ago
  "The voice that you were hearing is being transformed into a fully functional text-to-speech voice, specifically created for our Teddy." This sounds like the video used a pre-recorded voice. So it isn't even actually working yet.
angersock 13y ago
This reminds me of an old Harry Harrison short story, "I Always Do What Teddy Says". One wonders what sort of brainwashing potential a toy could be used for if it interacted this way with children.
- chiph 13y ago
  Read Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age
  - angersock 13y ago
    I have--honestly, not as poignant as the Harrison story in that one detail. It's too happy.
davidroetzel 13y ago
The recent NSA scandals seems to have put me in full tin foil hat mode. All I read here is: "We record everything you and/or your child say and send it to our servers."
- X4 13y ago
  Well, it's true. They record everything and upload it to their (US) servers to analyze the data in order to respond with the corresponding text and that's exactly how Siri works too. It would not be evil, if they made the software independant of the cloud, but I suspect they cannot due to a) the amount of data+processing speed required or b) in order to bind their customers. An evil teddy bear could subvert your kid to murder xyz, let your parents buy xyz or do other things. That's why all highly intelligent AI robots in Films are independent agile forces and sometimes even able to additionally connect to the hive (collective mind), but they very rarely operate on the command of the hive (exclude the borg, they ought to be like Seven of Nine).
X4 13y ago
Reminds me of the great movie "The Last Mimzy" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0768212/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0768212/ totally worth watching!
- rorrr2 13y ago
  Reminds me of "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" movie, it had the coolest talking bear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDgecjYaCCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDgecjYaCCA
  - pcdavid 13y ago
    This is most likely the inspiration: the company is named "Supertoy Robotics", and the A.I. movie was based on a Brian Aldiss short-story titled "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long".
kolektiv 13y ago
It seems like some quite strong claims are being made for the AI side of this here. Especially around things like adaptive understanding/learning. Using language like "aware" and "autonomous" is either inaccurate or potentially amazing/terrifying. That said, it's a fascinating project, and getting mass backing for these kinds of things is going somewhere I'd like to see the world heading. (Although I share the feelings that toys are really supposed to be about imagination - I've met so many young people lately with poor problem solving/conceptual skills, and I don't think that's disconnected from the increasing prevalence of highly passive young age play activities over the last couple of decades. I've got nothing scientific with which to back that statement though!)
- hexagonc 13y ago
  It doesn't take very advanced AI algorithms to satisfy the claim that the toy has adaptive understanding and learning. These are semi-marketing terms and could be covered pretty easily for laypeople and children. You have a set of predefined responses and use a weighted sampling algorithm to choose which one is executed, modified by user feedback or some other fitness test. Genetic and evolutionary algorithms already use a similar methodology.
kunil 13y ago
> Sleep - “Play rain effect for 25 minutes” A perfect way to get wet sheets!
- skore 13y ago
  You'd be surprised. For some children (particularly those who are very easy to wake up from noises), the static noise generated by rain is like morphine. We couldn't have made it through the first couple of months without it. Granted, that's diaper territory, so who knows whether it had a wet sheet effect, but still. If your child can't sleep and is very quick to wake on sounds, give it a try. And thank me later.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
There is no way on God's Great Green Earth I am letting some random bunch of strangers program a Teddy to talk to my children without me reading every line of code, and having every conversation recorded. Am I paranoid or is there this slippery slope way too steep?
- bvi 13y ago
  You are being paranoid.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    That's of course just what your Teddy told you to say :-)
speedyrev 13y ago
As soon as I saw the pic, I thought of this. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637725/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637725/ I hope it's more child friendly
alexhawdon 13y ago
Perhaps it's okay, because the target market might be likely to have a capable last-gen smartphone going spare, but my initial assumption was that the smartphone <-> bear connection would be done wirelessly. Having to submit your smartphone entirely to the bear's voice-control would be very frustrating to most people and I can see this being a limiting factor when it comes to actual usage.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lightblade 13y ago
This is what I hear.. Internet connected device...has camera...play with children. Recipe for disaster
Supertoy 13y ago
Hi please see this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrFzGKUs8-I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrFzGKUs8-I Love ALL your comments. If I look tired its because I pulled two all nighters getting accepted on Kickstarter :-)

This has got to be a scam. 1) The KS video is completely gimmiky 2) The voice of the bear is (as pointed out by akandiah) completely non-child friendly. 3) They're claiming they can get this tech to market for 99 pounds a piece, yet don't divulge any real technical information at all. 4) I'm not even convinced the talking in the video was genuine. I really hope I'm wrong, but if I'm not, I really hope the KS staff catch this one in the bud.

ctz 13y ago
I don't think $99 as a price point for a bear with an single DOF animitronic mouth and some dumb control hardware is unreasonable.
- chiph 13y ago
  Agreed. Teddy Ruxpin cost more (even in 1980's dollars) because it had eyes that moved as well as the mouth. Plus it had (depending on version) a cassette tape player or a digital cartridge player in it, instead of using an existing smartphone.
donpdonp 13y ago
The video is very misleading. The concepts and timing and inflections in the videos conversation are light years beyond what I've seen with off the shelf smartphones and software. I imagine the actual doll will be no better at conversations than Siri is, which is not a conversation at all. I dont think it has to be a scam - it could be essentially a bluetooth headset that provides a microphone and speaker in teddybear form, with some extra motors to actuate the mouth when playing audio. The idea of a supertoy is exciting as presented in the film "AI".
DanBC 13y ago
It's Teddy Ruxpin, but instead of "reading" cassette tapes it has a space for a smartphone. The (user supplier) smart phone does all the work. Except, even then, chatbots are hopeless and even Siri is often weird and sub-optimal. I get terrible results from normal questions. I speak with children. They have wondrous, amazing, confusing, marvelous, off-the-wall ideas. If anything can make a computer fail a Turing Test it's the questions of a child.

morsch 13y ago

Listen guys, if you're shipping for free within the UK, I'm not paying 20 GBP to ship to Germany.

X4 13y ago
Just curious, why?
ronaldx 13y ago
Understand your point and shipping on Kickstarters is often ill-considered. But, please bear in mind that this is one way that the UK is not very well joined up with the rest of the EU: International shipping from the UK is awkward and expensive compared to domestic shipping (at least in small volumes) - for example, it's unlikely the local Post Office in Abergavenny would even handle an international parcel of this size and weight. The ultimate difference in cost is probably >10GBP from the quotes I can find on parcels of an appropriate size and weight, although it's difficult to say.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- singularity2001 13y ago
  > bear in mind punny ;)

belorn 13y ago

How good is Siri-like programs when dealing with young children. Can it handle sentences with broken grammatical structure, or badly pronounced words?

po 13y ago

Hmm.. I wish people would stop thinking that what children need from a teddy bear (or any other doll-like toy) is more realism. Dolls are supposed to be for the child to project their own fantasy onto, not a portal into the internet. I'd rather have my child (if I had kids) speak to the PCB or phone or TV or whatever directly and leave the teddy bear to say whatever they dream it does. Maybe I read too much Calvin and Hobbes growing up. That being said, I do think that in the future we're going to have to start learning to be comfortable talking with computers.. so maybe this is a good thing. Not sure how I feel about this stuff now that I think about it.

skore 13y ago
> Dolls are supposed to be for the child to project their own fantasy onto[...] And not to forget: Dolls are most often initially "brought to life" by parents when playing with their children. They can form a vital path of communication and conveying of culture between parent and child. You could argue that the parent talks to the bear and the bear talks to the child. But seriously now - I don't want Siri between me and my child, thank you. Also - I don't want my child to be constantly affected by me. The good thing about a lifeless teddy bear is that they find out that they can change it, completely. If the Siri Bear is molded by me, initially, this now means that the degree to which it is able to be molded by the child is determined by the Siri Bear, not by the child.
- bargl 13y ago
  As a guy who is about to be a father, holy shit by the way, I appreciate this perspective. My first thought to this bear was, aww that's nice but I don't want one. Now it's more of, oh man I can see how the ramifications of something like this haven't quite been thought all the way through. What if this stifles the creativity of my child because it is too responsive? Or maybe it boxes them even more into an antisocial atmosphere. I just don't know, but I'll wait until the research has caught up with the technology. If there's one place I'm a luddite it's with regards to the rearing of children.
  - skore 13y ago

iuguy 13y ago

If you want to get an idea of what the voice capabilities of the toy might be like, the developers made an Android-based chatbot called Jeannie[1] that you can play with. [1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pannous.voice.actions.free&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pannous.vo...

skore 13y ago
I don't know how the video demonstration compares to Siri because I have never used it, but even if its performance is similar to Siri, the lag in that video is truly horrible. It would be especially horrible for a toy that is supposed to talk back. Imagine every human you talked to had a 6 second ping. "Bear, do you like me?" One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi. "Yes, I like you."

davidw 13y ago

Ok, I'll be that guy: "In a teddy bear" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_%28garment%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_%28garment%29

drharris 13y ago
Ok, I'll fess up that this was my first thought too.
- benjamincburns 13y ago
  Likewise. Although I quickly realized they were talking more "the bear from AI" than "the actress who played Siri on The Big Bang Theory."
  - karlkatzke 13y ago
    Me three. Although I didn't think of the Big Bang Theory connection, I thought of Apple's Siri and wondered if it was some sort of fan art with a mildly nsfw theme.
    - saw-lau 13y ago
      Likewise - extremely disappointed (although looking forward to setting browser to 'Teddy' this evening...).
ynniv 13y ago
A living example of a title that should be re-written by the moderators. ("Siri in a Teddy")

fbomb 13y ago

That's not what I had pictured at all ;-)

akandiah 13y ago

The voice (and the attitude) doesn't seem to be child-friendly. It's almost as if the makers were trying to re-create "Ted".

therobotking 13y ago
"The voice that you were hearing is being transformed into a fully functional text-to-speech voice, specifically created for our Teddy." This sounds like the video used a pre-recorded voice. So it isn't even actually working yet.

angersock 13y ago

This reminds me of an old Harry Harrison short story, "I Always Do What Teddy Says". One wonders what sort of brainwashing potential a toy could be used for if it interacted this way with children.

chiph 13y ago
Read Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age
- angersock 13y ago
  I have--honestly, not as poignant as the Harrison story in that one detail. It's too happy.

davidroetzel 13y ago

The recent NSA scandals seems to have put me in full tin foil hat mode. All I read here is: "We record everything you and/or your child say and send it to our servers."

X4 13y ago
Well, it's true. They record everything and upload it to their (US) servers to analyze the data in order to respond with the corresponding text and that's exactly how Siri works too. It would not be evil, if they made the software independant of the cloud, but I suspect they cannot due to a) the amount of data+processing speed required or b) in order to bind their customers. An evil teddy bear could subvert your kid to murder xyz, let your parents buy xyz or do other things. That's why all highly intelligent AI robots in Films are independent agile forces and sometimes even able to additionally connect to the hive (collective mind), but they very rarely operate on the command of the hive (exclude the borg, they ought to be like Seven of Nine).

X4 13y ago

Reminds me of the great movie "The Last Mimzy" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0768212/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0768212/ totally worth watching!

rorrr2 13y ago
Reminds me of "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" movie, it had the coolest talking bear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDgecjYaCCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDgecjYaCCA
- pcdavid 13y ago
  This is most likely the inspiration: the company is named "Supertoy Robotics", and the A.I. movie was based on a Brian Aldiss short-story titled "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long".

kolektiv 13y ago

It seems like some quite strong claims are being made for the AI side of this here. Especially around things like adaptive understanding/learning. Using language like "aware" and "autonomous" is either inaccurate or potentially amazing/terrifying. That said, it's a fascinating project, and getting mass backing for these kinds of things is going somewhere I'd like to see the world heading. (Although I share the feelings that toys are really supposed to be about imagination - I've met so many young people lately with poor problem solving/conceptual skills, and I don't think that's disconnected from the increasing prevalence of highly passive young age play activities over the last couple of decades. I've got nothing scientific with which to back that statement though!)

hexagonc 13y ago
It doesn't take very advanced AI algorithms to satisfy the claim that the toy has adaptive understanding and learning. These are semi-marketing terms and could be covered pretty easily for laypeople and children. You have a set of predefined responses and use a weighted sampling algorithm to choose which one is executed, modified by user feedback or some other fitness test. Genetic and evolutionary algorithms already use a similar methodology.

kunil 13y ago

> Sleep - “Play rain effect for 25 minutes” A perfect way to get wet sheets!

skore 13y ago
You'd be surprised. For some children (particularly those who are very easy to wake up from noises), the static noise generated by rain is like morphine. We couldn't have made it through the first couple of months without it. Granted, that's diaper territory, so who knows whether it had a wet sheet effect, but still. If your child can't sleep and is very quick to wake on sounds, give it a try. And thank me later.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

There is no way on God's Great Green Earth I am letting some random bunch of strangers program a Teddy to talk to my children without me reading every line of code, and having every conversation recorded. Am I paranoid or is there this slippery slope way too steep?

bvi 13y ago
You are being paranoid.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  That's of course just what your Teddy told you to say :-)

speedyrev 13y ago

As soon as I saw the pic, I thought of this. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637725/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637725/ I hope it's more child friendly

alexhawdon 13y ago

Perhaps it's okay, because the target market might be likely to have a capable last-gen smartphone going spare, but my initial assumption was that the smartphone <-> bear connection would be done wirelessly. Having to submit your smartphone entirely to the bear's voice-control would be very frustrating to most people and I can see this being a limiting factor when it comes to actual usage.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

lightblade 13y ago

This is what I hear.. Internet connected device...has camera...play with children. Recipe for disaster

Supertoy 13y ago

Hi please see this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrFzGKUs8-I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrFzGKUs8-I Love ALL your comments. If I look tired its because I pulled two all nighters getting accepted on Kickstarter :-)