ToyTalk: When Teddy Meets Siri

http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/09/talking-teddybears-raise-11-5m/

On Nov. 10^th, ToyTalk has raised $11.5 million in its first round of institutional funding. This brings ToyTalk’s total capital raised to almost $16 million, following a $4 million seed round led by Greylock partners, with participation from True Ventures, First Round Capital, and angel investors.

According to previous report (http://readwrite.com/2012/02/17/ex-pixar_geeks_building_siri-style_line_of_toys), ToyTalk is trying to integrate the Siri-like artificial intelligence (AI) into toys, on purpose of enabling interaction between kids and their toys.

The core team members includes: CEO Oren Jacob, who had served as CTO in Pixar for 20 years; CTO DrMartin Reddy, who is a Computer Science PhD with more than 40 published papers and 5 years of experience building geospatial visualization technology at the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, the organization that built Siri; Creative Director Bobby Podesta worked on Pixar movies like A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and was a Directing Animator on Cars.

Apparently, this team is able to create most adorable and most intelligent toy in the world. So what enables ToyTalk?

As a matter of fact, AI-based applications and products are no longer a new concept. Researchers and industries have already invested a large amount of fund to develop more intelligent tools for daily life. However, the resource requirements (e.g. massive storage for rules and knowledge, complicated algorithm for pattern reorganization, etc. ) for AI-assisted system are always a heavy load for local machines, especially when these applications are installed on mobile devices.

One of the most recent solutions is to offload these tasks to a server, thanks to the ubiquitous wireless network connections. Siri is a typical application of this kind, in which the server provides services, while the mobile devices are served as an interface for users, which is a typical working model of mobile cloud computing.

ToyTalk can be considered as another application of this kind. Toys are the most favorite interface for kids, while the integrated wireless module bring the strong content support from the cloud-end. With the development of these technologies, ToyTalk is looking for a new path to help kids in daily life, such as language study, education, entertainment, ect. It is a potential product to shock the entertainment and education industry for children.