With the development of science and technology, toys no longer stick to traditional forms. Among the various toy products, which ones can be called smart? How smart are they? Where is the development direction of the smart toy industry?
Remember the cute Baymax in “Big Hero 6”? Understanding, smart, and cute. Baymax is the human imagination of an intelligent robot toy. With the application of artificial intelligence technology, toys in life are gradually becoming smarter.
What is the “wisdom” of smart toys, and how far are we from Baymax?
From Offline to Online
Recently, a smart toy robot produced by Ruko has become very popular among children. It is equipped with a sensitive sensor, the robot changes expression when you touch its head and responds to you cutely. With the abundant display function of the Robot’s remote control app, it is truly programmable intelligent smart interesting.
“Toys + intelligence” is becoming the development trend in the toy industry. Traditional toys rely on machinery and design and have relatively single functions. After integrating new technologies such as programming, Bluetooth, and sensors, toys can interact with users to a certain extent and have stronger emotional attributes.
There is currently no unified definition of smart toys in the industry. Generally speaking, the current smart toys mainly include three types: action, companionship, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education.
The most common ones are action smart toys. For example, the Transformers robot can transform with one click and become both a robot and a remote-controlled car. Some of them can also “launch weapons.” Companion smart toys are similar to children’s learning machines or early education machines. After being embedded in the intelligent system, they have various voice communication functions such as telling stories, reciting ancient poems, and singing children’s songs. STEM educational toys integrate technology science and engineering knowledge, allowing children to train in logical thinking in entertainment.
From the perspective of integrating content, combining it with English learning and image reading is also an important innovation of smart toys. Some smart toys can be embedded in English courses and realize interaction through artificial intelligence technologies such as voice and tactile sensing to supervise and guide learning. Some can also use image recognition technology to process picture book data to achieve interactive reading and enhance learning interest.” Kevin Chen, the sales manager of Ruko Toy said.
“In recent years, an important progress in smart toys is from offline to online.” Kevin Chen said that an 8G memory card can store up to 3,000 children’s songs in a traditional offline story machine, but an online smart story machine can play a large number of Internet resources. , as well as intelligent on-demand functions.
“Smart” toys have also captured the hearts of many adults. Compared with children’s toys, adults value the decompression and companionship functions of smart toys. Some well-designed electronic pets are favored by many adults.
Smart Toys Are Still a Bit “Stupid”
Experts said that in-depth integration with artificial intelligence, the Internet, and other technologies is expected to inject new vitality into the toy industry. However, the current development of smart toys encounters many difficulties. Since artificial intelligence is still in the stage of perceptual intelligence, its cognitive learning ability is very weak. “In addition to being able to speak and understand some questions, smart toys are generally relatively ‘stupid’ and are far from Baymax imagined by children. Some smart toys are actually not “smart” enough. Many people believe that the IP image in the toy field is very critical. The IP image on the Chinese market is seriously homogenized, which is not beneficial to long-term development.
“The lack of own brands has caused Chinese manufacturers to produce top-quality products but not obtain reasonable profits. The absence of own brands and IP product image leads to a lack of appeal, short product life cycles, and low added value returns are the pain points of China’s smart toy industry. “Kevin Chen said.
Because they have functions such as cameras and GPS positioning and are embedded with technologies such as voice interaction and remote video monitoring, the safety issues of smart toys have also become the focus of the industry.
Julia Chao, the product specialist of Ruko toy, said that eliminating users’ concerns about privacy leaks and preventing Internet content that is not suitable for children are issues that smart toys must solve. He believes that it is necessary to carry out intelligent services locally to avoid spreading them to the network. In addition, multi-layer encryption control of network data should be implemented to prevent information leakage. At the same time, we strictly review the dialogue materials and content to provide children with pure educational services.
Toys Are an Extension of Learning Tools.
Benefiting from the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, the intelligence factors in toys continue to increase, and they also play an increasingly important role in early childhood education. Some experts believe that some map programming enlightenment toys made with the help of machine vision can stimulate children’s creativity and logical thinking; intelligent speech recognition facilitates children’s acquisition of knowledge and helps children intuitively feel the charm of artificial intelligence. It can be said that teaching tools are an extension of toys. However, if educational smart toys want to go further in education, they need to strengthen their connection with teaching courses and educational content. They cannot just focus on the smart hardware products themselves and ignore the research on educational methods and content.
Overall, the development of smart toys has just started and will become diversified. For a long time in the future, there will be a wide variety of intelligent toy forms. For example, there will be various kinds of early education smart toys. In addition, traditional toys such as electric toys and plush toys will also have intelligent elements to enhance the fun and companionship of the toys. Experts say that if technologies such as artificial intelligence make cognitive breakthroughs in the future and smart toys truly understand people’s emotions, we will not be far away from making a real Baymax by then.
