AI-Powered Talking Teddy Bear Hands-On: Do You Trust This With Your Kids?

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: - Generative AI is in phones, it's in laptops, and now it's in children's toys. This is Poe, the AI story bear, the first AI teddy bear. [00:00:10] Speaker 2: - With a swab smile and a twinkle in his eye. - Forming him into a mindless zombie. [00:00:15] Speaker 1: - It reads aloud stories created by ChatGPT4O from OpenAI. And this toy is hitting retail stores this August for $50. Here's how it works. Using an app, kids pick the characters, the objects, the setting and themes of the story that they want the bear to create. And really, it's ChatGPT that's generating a short tail on the back end. It's going through filters and then back into the app, which is Bluetooth connected to the bear. [00:00:47] Speaker 3: - Once upon a time in a world where dreams came to life, there lived a young ninja girl named Sakura. [00:00:53] Speaker 1: - That's one of the preloaded stories in this sample bear. It's a story of a ninja that fights nightmare monsters in Candyland. Now, the bear can tell stories in over 20 languages. You can save stories and play them offline by just clicking the buttons in the ears. Now, I've been given this early sample of Poe to try with my kids at home. And I'm told that the voices I'm experiencing are not the final voice of the bear. But I wanted to show you this to give you an idea of how it all works. The final voice is coming in partnership with Eleven Labs. It's a company that makes generative AI voices. But even just sitting here filming this video, there's been a few other voices that I've noticed come out. [00:01:33] Speaker 4: A brave mermaid named Marina swam speedily through the corridors filled with glowing tanks and strange machines. [00:01:39] Speaker 2: A roller skating nurse sipping a milkshake. A prince riding a motorcycle. And a cowgirl enjoying some Asian noodles. [00:01:47] Speaker 1: Here's a sample the company gave me of what the final Poe could sound like. [00:01:52] Speaker 3: The dragon's gold. Once upon a time, in the magical land of Everwood, there lived a brave and clever young girl named Lily. She had bright red hair, sparkling green eyes, and always wore a cape made of feathers. [00:02:05] Speaker 1: Now, I have a lot of thoughts after playing with this with my kids because there is something weird as a parent about not knowing what an AI machine is going to say to my children. But all the stories we generated were just kind of quirky. The worst of it was that sometimes they got a little spooky. I mean, you do have options in here for some creepy characters like zombies. And in one story, zombies were having their heads knocked off in battle. [00:02:32] Speaker 2: A baseball player swung a metal bat, knocking zombie heads off their bodies. Zircon scowled and raised his hands. [00:02:39] Speaker 1: But the final version will let parents block certain monsters or scary themes if they want to. [00:02:45] Speaker 2: The shuttle was haunted by the ghost of Yorick Underbridge, an insane astronaut who had died in an explosion years ago. What? B-W-A-Ha-Ha-Ha. Cackled Underbridge's ghost. [00:02:54] Speaker 1: Let's just make a story up right now to show you. All right, let's pick an adventure story. Okay, we can make a mermaid in this story, a spooky mummy, a robot. Yeah, let's do a robot. Robot's the bad guy. We'll have it include some jelly beans and a fart. Why not? And we'll have it involve teleportation and it'll be in a secret lab. All right, make up the story. [00:03:29] Speaker 4: Deep beneath the ocean where the water shimmered with glowing fish and hidden treasures lived a mermaid named Coral. One day, Coral received a mysterious message in a bottle. It read, "Help needed at the top secret lab. Urgent." Suddenly, the door behind her clanked open and in stomped a giant robot. "Who dares enter my lab?" It boomed with a voice like thunder. Coral swallowing her fear replied, "I'm Coral and I got a message for help." What's going on? [00:03:59] Speaker 1: So the stories it generates kind of exist in this literary uncanny valley where there are some random turns the story can take that can be hard to follow or maybe sometimes the words are a little strange. Like maybe the vocab isn't something that you would always see in a kid's story. [00:04:15] Speaker 2: With luck, unravel the cosmic knot that doomed her kingdom to unending torment. [00:04:25] Speaker 1: Did you understand it? Not that much. In my time with it, sometimes the kids were kind of puzzled about what was happening. It says so many things. It says so many things. Part of the struggle is that during my test some of the voices it was giving me didn't have pauses or rhythm. The kind of rhythm that you would hear from a voice actor. Maybe it'll be a little easier as the voices improve. But this of course makes me think about my childhood. And I grew up with the first animatronic talking toy, Teddy Ruxpin. And here you had this bear that played audio from cassette tapes with matching books. And there was a team of writers and musicians and voice actors that sang. Parents knew what story they were buying in this adventure series about friendship. Now the art that made Teddy Ruxpin special has been exported to a machine in the cloud. [00:05:22] Speaker 2: That's when he realized the horrible truth. This was no mere robot, but some sort of evil alien construct straight out of a cosmic nightmare. [00:05:33] Speaker 1: Wait, that's the story? On the plus side here, we got an activity for a kid where they can practice listening. And they can get a random story every time. Through the app, they can kind of have some control over what they generate. [00:05:45] Speaker 2: Conjuring everything from a flock of ghostly seagulls to a tornado of fried chicken. But it was no use. With a tremendous splash, the zombie horde turned to dust. [00:05:56] Speaker 1: Now at one point, it felt like Poe became a game with my kids. Because they were trying to make a story with every character and every object selected. So kids sometimes start thinking about how they can make something really crazy. What if you do all of them? What if you do all of them? Go ahead, do it. Do all of them. You see, with Poe, it's kind of like trusting a stranger to tell a story to your kid. But the stranger is a robot that other tech companies trust. By that, I mean Apple. Apple seems to be okay with using ChatGPT to tell stories to your kids. Because in Apple's June Worldwide Developers Conference presentation, an executive said, "A handy use of ChatGPT would be to have it tell your six-year-old a bedtime story about butterflies." The Poe Bear takes that same idea. It puts limits on the subjects you can pick and the length of the story. And it sends it to another AI voice program. And the whole thing plays through a squishy bear that takes batteries. Interesting little time we're living in where AI is now cute. This toy is made by a company called Skyrocket. It makes silly talking toys that use modern tech and sensors in ways to make kids laugh. But major toy makers have been looking at this question of using AI in toys for a few years now. I have seen it at the big toy shows I visit. There are robots that tap into generative AI to chat with kids or answer questions. And some of them right now are pretty expensive. And when I go to these industry events, there are panels exploring how to use generative AI in toys. I mean, take a year ago where the CEO of VTech said he saw an AI storytelling teddy bear would be the norm by 2028. Well, it is here with us now in 2024. Even if this Poe testing voice is still being worked out, I do expect it to evolve fast. Let me know how you feel about it all in the comments below. You know, AI is a shiny new toy right now for every tech bro out there. But will it also be in your kids' shiny new toys? I'm Bridget Carey. Be sure to subscribe to follow our adventures as we keep playing around in this new era of AI. [00:08:07] Speaker ?: We'll see you next time.