A brand new AI-powered teddy bear may be the answer to storytime together with your youngsters or an eerie robotic making an attempt to usurp a parenting responsibility, relying in your viewpoint. Tech toy firm Skyrocket hopes you may see Poe the AI Story Bear as the previous. The plush toy employs AI fashions from OpenAI to compose new tales primarily based on concepts advised by a baby, that are then informed by the bear in a pleasant, however artificial voice produced with ElevenLabs’ AI speech creator.
The custom-made tales are put collectively by the AI mannequin utilizing a variety of choices {that a} little one can decide from the accompanying Poe AI Bear: Story Creator app. There are lots of of curated choices for story parts, and youngsters can decide a variety of themes, characters, and areas for the story, even inserting themselves into it. In the event that they just like the ensuing story, they will reserve it to hearken to once more or transfer on and check out different choices subsequent time.
Due to the AI used to give you the tales, there could also be similarities primarily based on the chosen icons within the app, however every story will in the end be totally different even when the identical choices are chosen a number of occasions. There’s just one AI voice included with Poe, however ElevenLabs’ fashions give it context-aware emotional tones and in any other case mimic how a human speaks. Poe can inform tales in 30 languages, those constructed into the ElevenLabs mannequin.
“Poe the AI Story Bear empowers youngsters with the flexibility to create superb, customized tales that they will love listening to many times,” Skyrocket CEO Nelo Lucich defined. “It is at all times been a dream to have toys that come alive and now it is doable with AI. Poe the AI Story Bear embraces the optimistic elements of AI expertise and makes it accessible to all forms of shoppers from various backgrounds and languages and at a budget-friendly value level.”
AI Toy Story
In fact, for a kid’s product, security goes to be a serious concern. To assuage worries, Skyrocket has designed Poe to solely pull enter from the app, so there aren’t any cameras, microphones, or direct web entry, simply Bluetooth to hyperlink to the cellular gadget. There are additionally stricter than ordinary safeguards on the content material the AI mannequin suggests for the story. That is additionally why the choices for themes and characters are curated, limiting the possibility of something inappropriate inadvertently arising.
The high-tech energy of Poe is surprisingly inexpensive at $50. Skyrocket has ambitions to develop a complete line of toys with AI-powered options, however the actual query is that if mother and father will see Poe as their kid’s extra talkative Buzz Lightyear or a sinister latter-day Furby.