In today's world of toys, interaction is vastly limited to simple movements and sentences are often repetitive, fixed and involve very little (if any) interaction with other toys.
A demand therefore exists for technology that makes it possible for toys to interact with each other and children in witty, smart, interesting and conversationally diverse ways. Such toys should not be bound by a few short sentences, a lack of context or have the same monotonic dialogue.
Smart Toys enables creation of toys fully capable of intelligent asynchronous speech with other toys while largely eliminating the disadvantages relative to conventional speech-related toys and electronic games by providing a toy. It is a further object of Smart Toys to provide a toy that is uninhibited with restrictions such as wires, platforms, power supplies, etc. and fully durable to withstand the daily duress inflicted by even the most adventurous of children.
The appearance of the conversation among the toys is provided by incorporation of several cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced communication, protocols and hardware, the latest in speech storage and playback, micro-controller technologies and a host of others to achieve multi-modal collaborative agent communication.
Recognition is the ability for any device embedded with the Smart Toys technology to dynamically recognize the environment it is introduced into. This could be anywhere from a single character to a series of toys and sometimes with duplicates. The concept of duplicate recognition is important when a group of children are engaged in play and there is a stronger preference of some characters over others. The technology is also able to handle communication across a series of toys and the dynamic inclusion and exclusion of them, i.e. the toys know who is joining the group and who is leaving! Interaction is the ability for the technology to handle varied forms of communication. This enables it to now be part of a toy figure, a device or embedded into any form such as cell phones etc.
Interactions currently include speech, multimedia which could range from simple conversations to discussions that may have multiple speakers (simultaneous) as well as synchronization with other forms of media such as images, movie clips etc.
Actions such as servo motor controls other electronic forms of communication and control can be easily incorporated for situations when the technology needs to control hardware functions in a toy or device. Lastly all these varied forms of interaction must take into account the needs of the children to now interact personally with this technology. Our technology can handle several such forms of inputs from simple push buttons to complex third-party voice recognition software.
Versatility & Simplicity address the fact that the technology needs to be platform independent as well as free from the domain of application. This stipulates that the technology should be able to run on any hardware device (that meet the minimum operating requirements) and on any software. This also means that the technology should be application domain independent, might it be an action figure or a plush animal or a friend residing in a cell phone.
