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Sunday, July 19, 2015

How smart are connected toys?

Toys are starting to talk back to children, but they may not be better for your children than a silent teddy
Vaikai

Think back to when you were a child: the thought of your favourite doll or teddy bear learning your name and intelligently talking to you would be simply magical.
That’s the promise of connected toys. Hello Barbie is a $75 doll that can listen to your child and respond intelligently; CognitToys offers an artificial intelligence dinosaur for $120 that learns with children, getting smarter as they do; and theAvakai is a €67 wooden toy that communicates over the internet.
As appealing as such interactive toys may sound to little ones, they raise questions for their parents: are they really more engaging or educational than “dumb” alternatives? Are they secure or do they raise children to disregard privacy? Are they a gimmick?
The parents we spoke to were not convinced. One Mumsnet member said she bought her daughter an app-enabled Furbie Boom (£65) for her eighth birthday, but it wasn’t any more engaging than more traditional toys. She said: “She only played with it for about a day, and has hardly looked at it since.”
Other parents weren’t any more positive. Such toys look like they “limit the imagination potential of playing,” one said, while another said: “Teddy Ruxpin scared the crap out of me”.
The research on the developmental efficacy of smart toys is still out, though two experts we asked said they wouldn’t buy such toys – that said, the opinions of child psychologists and security analysts may hold little water with a demanding toddler mid tantrum.
“I’m an associate professor of cognitive development [and] I wouldn’t recommend them to parents,” said Graham Schafer, associate professor at the University of Reading. “At the moment, they’re in the world of things that companies are trying to market to parents and they’re essentially superfluous or a novelty.”
Sean Sullivan agreed. The security adviser at antivirus firm F-Secure doesn’t let his five-year-old child use any technology without supervision, whether it’s a tablet or a talking bear – though that’s more for development reasons than security.

Good for development?

As much as your children might beg for such smart toys, don’t buy into claims that they’ll help development or education. Schafer said the small amount of research that has been done suggests such smart toys aren’t beneficial to “typically developing children,” he said, though for children with autism there might be some advantages.
However, such toys would have to be developed with a specific issue in mind – what works for a child with autism won’t work for a child with a speech delay, for example. “Children with autism are a particularly special case in that they often have difficulty interacting with people and find it easier to interact with things,” he said. “I think it would be a really bad idea for a child with speech delay, because it’s so unlike speech and normal communication.”
Schafer said that the interaction offered by such toys lacks subtlety, meaning they’re not ideal for children learning to speak, especially those struggling to do so. Plus, because they aren’t yet very sophisticated, they’re not much smarter than previous “talking” toys that didn’t have internet connections, so he doesn’t expect them to be much more engaging.
However, he said that “you’d be a fool” if you thought robotics and computing weren’t going to improve or become a key part of children’s toys. “They may get very good, but they’re not very good at the moment.”
The fact they’re web-connected could actually help. “That is obviously a big potential advantage in that they can upgrade these things online,” said Schafer. “But the idea it’s actually learning about the personality of the child, I think that’s a fatuous claim. There isn’t a very sophisticated computer [that can] do that, never mind a toy.”
The smart toys on offer of course differ in their sophistication. Available later this year, the Hello Barbie is expected to use speech recognition and uploads snippets of speech to the cloud for analysis – sort of like a plastic Siri – while the IBM-backed CogniToys dinosaur connects to AI genius Watson, the computer that won US quiz show Jeopardy. Will that make it a step ahead as a toy?
“I’m sceptical about that,” said Schafer, explaining that AI works well in specific domains that are well understood, such as medical diagnosis. “There isn’t a domain of conversation in culture which is understood by IBM or anybody else. It’s just what we do. It’s too big for the machine.”

Security

Traditional dolls may not have conversations with your children, but they also don’t infringe their privacy or safety.
Any device with a camera that’s connected to wi-fi raises concerns though – there have been reports over the past few years of creeps hacking smart baby monitors, with one doing it to scream at children, while Vivid Toy’s Cayla Doll was hacked to swear. Imagine the ensuing nightmares if your child’s favourite doll starts screaming curses.
There are key protections to look for in a connected toy to prevent such incidents. “Ideally, a webcam, camera, [or] mic device should be restricted to the local network or have strict remote access controls,” F-Secure’s Sullivan advised.
“When such devices connect with the cloud, they should definitely use HTTPS encryption for that communication,” he added. “You can build it secure, but eventually, somebody will find a bug. The key question is can it be updated to maintain its security? Will toy companies go to that expense?”
While there’s so far little concern that personal data will be lost, that could change in the future. “Although toys don’t store financial data, passwords and the like, toys with direct internet connectivity should give parents pause,” Sullivan noted. “And consider this, how long before such toys include in-app purchases?”

In defense of smart toy


“We see the best qualities of the traditional toys are disappearing,” said Petrikas. “We bring in the connection and we bridge the gap between traditional toys that worked really well in the past hundreds of years, and bringing them into the 21st century with a connection.”Justyna Zubrycka and Matas Petrikas are building a smart toy – but the German design duo think it has more in common with traditional toys than rival IoT abominations.
Their Avakai is a small wooden doll that can communicate to an app or another doll via Bluetooth. The dolls can interact within 50m, but the app allows any distance. That means you can use them to play hide-and-seek – the dolls light up when you get close – or to send a message, say lighting it up in a special colour to let your little one know you’re on the way to pick them up from daycare.
Because the dolls are so simple, there’s no limit to how they can be used. “There were many games they [children] just invented,” said Zubrycka. “For instance, they started to make secret messages like drawings and then they would hide one doll and then they would make whole play sessions and a whole story around it.”
The toy encrypts its communications and doesn’t have a camera – a key design decision – and as there’s no data communicated and the name of the child is never used, privacy issues are less of a concern. “This is not a device that gathers information from a child and then uses it somehow in a marketing way,” said Zubrycka. “All these technological features in the child’s hand is actually... supposed to empower a child. So the child decides how to play with it and what to do with it.”
“It’s not an interface to internet. It’s an interface to play,” added Petrikas. Whether that convinces parents and children of course remains to be seen, and while the project just failed to win enough backers for Kickstarter funding, it’s carrying on via its own website with a single doll costing €67.
The way Zubrycka and Petrikas see it, Android tablets and iPhones are built for adults in mind, and someone needs to think of the children. “We are creating a completely different way for children to experience technology and it’s based on the best traditions from the past, you know – playing together with our children, inventing their own games,” said Petrikas.
However, Sullivan questioned whether smart toys could truly compete with more engaging tech gadgets, from tablets to Raspberry-Pi controlled robots.
“I can understand why toy companies are wanting to use cloud [or] internet tech. There are numerous types of entertainment competing for children’s attention,” he said. “The sort of ‘smart’ toys I see in development appear to be aimed at an ever shrinking market. I don’t think the cloud is going to save toy companies. Why get a talking Barbie when you can build your own robot?
Perhaps the real revolution in toy tech will be your daughter building her own talking doll, rather than asking for Hello Barbie for her birthday.

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