Mattel, the toy company that brought you Barbie and Ken, is now joining the AI race though Aristotle, a kid's version of Amazon Echo. The AI voice assistant is especially designed to understand kids and respond to them in a way like a nanny would respond, like someone who will help parents with their child-rearing.
Mattel came up with the idea of designing a voice assistant for kids because they want to design a baby product that grows with their customers. What they came up with is a smart baby monitor which can do so much, such as soothing your baby to sleep and reminding you if you're running out of diapers.
Aristotle has two modes - parent mode and child mode. In the parent mode, you can program it to track your child's habits from changing diapers to feeding time. It also reminds you what baby items you need to replenish. It is also linked to Alexa and you can talk to Aristotle directly instead of Alexa. Then, she relays the information you gave her to the other AI.
In the child mode, you can disable the Alexa personality because, according to Mattel's senior vice president and chief products officer Robb Fujioka, you don't want your children shopping for whatever they want without your knowledge.
More than the parent mode, Mattel is banking on the connection Aristotle can make with children; thus, it designed Aristotle to understand and recognized toddlers to adults through personalized voice recognition. Parents can help their child recite a few paragraphs of information so that Aristotle can recognize the child's voice. From there, children can then use it to ask almost anything, even ask her to play a game.
Aside from the speaker, Aristotle is also equipped with a camera which can identify and recognize things which have no electronics inside, such as flashcards or die cast toy cars.
Mattel is set to launch Aristotle in June and and is priced at $300.
