
Siri in a Teddy - singularity2001
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2117525416/supertoy-worlds-first-natural-talking-teddy-bear
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po
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
> 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
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.

~~~
po
I first noticed it with more and more 'realistic' baby dolls targeted at
girls. Dolls that cry like a real baby, make noises, have wakeup timers, etc…
totally unnecessary. After that, I just couldn't stop seeing it in other toys.
But thinking back to my childhood, it was the simpler, more abstract toys that
I remember. Hell, I still remember that cardboard box our kitchen stove was
delivered in that I turned into a tank. That lasted like a month and it was
just a bunch of cardboard.

Good luck on being a father. Remember that probably 90% of what kids need is
consistency and love and you don't have to think that part through much at
all. :-)

~~~
skore
> Hell, I still remember that cardboard box our kitchen stove was delivered in
> that I turned into a tank.

I was just talking about the Siri Teddy with my wife when this came up - More
often than not, the box that something came in was a _lot_ more interesting
than the thing itself. And when somebody in the family got new shoes, getting
the shoebox was heaven. I vividly remember being upset a couple of times
because my parents forgot to bring home the box when they got new shoes.

Oh the things we built(/d) from cardboard boxes. That's what life is all
about.

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davidw
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
Ok, I'll fess up that this was my first thought too.

~~~
benjamincburns
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
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
Likewise - extremely disappointed (although looking forward to setting browser
to 'Teddy' this evening...).

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davidroetzel
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
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).

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lifeisstillgood
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
You are being paranoid.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
That's of course just what your Teddy told you to say :-)

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aaronsnoswell
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
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
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.

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kolektiv
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
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.

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

~~~
ronaldx
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.

~~~
singularity2001
> bear in mind punny ;)

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akandiah
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
"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.

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angersock
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
Read Neil Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_

~~~
angersock
I have--honestly, not as poignant as the Harrison story in that one detail.
It's too happy.

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iuguy
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.vo...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pannous.voice.actions.free&hl=en)

~~~
skore
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."

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

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alexhawdon
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.

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

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Supertoy
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 :-)

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X4
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
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
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".

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speedyrev
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

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

~~~
skore
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.

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lightblade
This is what I hear..

Internet connected device...has camera...play with children.

Recipe for disaster

