A new AI-powered teddy bear might be the solution to storytime with your kids or an eerie robot attempting to usurp a parenting duty, depending on your point of view. Tech toy company Skyrocket hopes you'll see Poe the AI Story Bear as the former. The plush toy employs AI models from OpenAI to compose new stories based on ideas suggested by a child, which are then told by the bear in a friendly, but synthetic voice produced with ElevenLabs' AI speech creator.
The customized stories are put together by the AI model using a wide range of options that a child can pick from the accompanying Poe AI Bear: Story Creator app. There are hundreds of curated options for story elements, and kids can pick a wide range of themes, characters, and locations for the story, even inserting themselves into it. If they like the resulting story, they can save it to listen to again or move on and try out other options next time.
Because of the AI used to come up with the stories, there may be similarities based on the chosen icons in the app, but each story will ultimately be different even if the same options are chosen multiple times. There's only one AI voice included with Poe, but ElevenLabs' models give it context-aware emotional tones and otherwise mimic how a human speaks. Poe can tell stories in 30 languages, the ones built into the ElevenLabs model.
"Poe the AI Story Bear empowers kids with the ability to create amazing, personalized stories that they'll love listening to again and again," Skyrocket CEO Nelo Lucich explained. "It's always been a dream to have toys that come alive and now it's possible with AI. Poe the AI Story Bear embraces the positive aspects of AI technology and makes it accessible to all types of consumers from diverse backgrounds and languages and at a budget-friendly price point."
AI Toy Story
Of course, for a child's product, safety is going to be a major concern. To assuage worries, Skyrocket has designed Poe to only pull input from the app, so there are no cameras, microphones, or direct internet access, just Bluetooth to link to the mobile device. There are also stricter than usual safeguards on the content the AI model suggests for the story. That's also why the options for themes and characters are curated, limiting the chance of anything inappropriate inadvertently coming up.
The high-tech power of Poe is surprisingly affordable at $50. Skyrocket has ambitions to develop a whole line of toys with AI-powered features, but the real question is if parents will see Poe as their child's more talkative Buzz Lightyear or a sinister latter-day Furby.
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