Two thousand American kids are training the next generation of talking toys, the first of which could be out by Christmas. The toys will be based on a small speaker-independent speech recognition system that can recognise and respond to 50 words or phrases (this will rise next year to to 500 phrases). Toys with built-in internet access could follow.
"Things like Furby are not very interactive compared with what we're working on," says Richard Lee, the chief operating officer of Human Interface Worldwide, a small startup based in Seoul, Korea. "Our strategy is to make toys really interactive. We haven't been to any toy fairs yet, but when we do, we're confident our product will blow away everything that is out in the marketplace."
When a child says "I love you," the toy can say "You're my best friend," while the response to "Goodnight" could be "Goodnight, sweet dreams" or whatever. The same question could prompt different responses at different times: it all depends on the scriptwriter, and the programming.
"Smart toys" are believed to have about 5% of a global toy market worth $65bn in 1998, including computer and video games. The potential market for toys with speech recognition is much larger than the $3.25bn that implies. Speech recognition could be added to a wide range of dolls, soft toys and action figures, as well as toy telephones, juke boxes, clocks, voice-controlled video game controllers and other devices.
Many toy sales are driven by characters ranging from Mickey Mouse to South Park, and Lee says that HI Worldwide has signed a "memorandum of understanding with a major US motion picture and TV company" to co-develop toys. The company is also developing "talking Fifa World Cup mascots" for the event in Korea and Japan in 2002.
HI will not make or sell toys. Its strategy is to license characters and use them to develop toys for manufacturers such as Hasbro and Mattel. Examples could include Stuart Little, the talking mouse from Sony's hit movie of the same name, and Nintendo's Pikachu from Pokémon.
"All the characters have their own movies and their own TV series and their own characters and voices, so we'd want Stuart Little or Pikachu or Big Bird to respond in their own voices," says Lee.
The first toys will hold about 60 minutes of voice output. This will increase as flash memory chips get bigger and cheaper.
HI is using speech recognition technology from a Belgian company, Lernout & Hauspie, and was set up in December when it signed an exclusive license to use L&H's technology in toys. It hasn't produced anything yet, but it is developing a speech recognition and voice output system.
This will be implemented using a digital signal processing (DSP) chip, will fit on a 6cm x 4cm circuit board, and should be ready in June. Later the system will be shrunk to a quarter of the size by using a custom Asic (application specific integrated circuit) chip.
Early next year, HI plans to have prototypes using L&H's ASR1800 software to recognise 500 phrases. This version will also support Wap, (wireless application protocol) to access a cutdown version of the web. Smart toys would then be able to work with the internet.
"In principle, you could talk to the toy and the toy could retrieve data wirelessly from the internet and tell it to you," says Lee. "That way you're not dependent on what's in the memory. A child could ask the toy 'Who's the president of the United States?', the toy could find out using real-time internet access and say 'Bill Clinton, didn't you know that?' The toy can help educate them."
The first systems will use English. HI will also offer French, German, Japanese and Korean. Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Spanish and Portuguese will follow.
The speech circuitry is still too big for many toys, but Lee proposes putting it in accessories. "If we can't put it in a Barbie doll we can certainly put it in Barbie's Corvette or Ken's horse, or GI Joe's back-pack or whatever."
HI's modules will be relatively expensive - around $20-$40, depending on volume - but Lee isn't worried about that. Smart toys could sell for five times as much as dumb ones, so the character owners, toy manufacturers and retailers will all benefit. "They have nothing to lose by promoting us: we're giving them the opportunity to make more money," says Lee.
But it may be bad news for parents.
