A new AI-powered teddy bear could be the solution to story time with your kids or a creepy robot trying to usurp parenting duties, depending on your point of view. Tech toy company Skyrocket hopes you’ll see Poe the AI Story Bear as the former. The plush toy employs OpenAI’s AI models to compose new stories based on ideas suggested by a child, which are then told by the bear in a friendly but synthetic voice produced with ElevenLabs’ AI voice maker.
The AI model creates the personalized stories using a wide range of options that the child can choose from in the Poe AI Bear: Story Creator app. There are hundreds of curated options for story elements, and children can choose a wide range of themes, characters, and locations for the story, even inserting themselves into it. If they like the resulting story, they can save it to listen to again or move on to something else and try other options next time.
Because of the AI used to create the stories, there may be similarities based on the icons chosen in the app, but each story will ultimately be different even if the same options are chosen multiple times. Poe only includes one AI voice, but ElevenLabs’ models give it emotional tones that adapt to the context and mimic human speech. Poe can tell stories in 30 languages, which are built into the ElevenLabs model.
“Poe the AI Story Bear gives kids the ability to create amazing, personalized stories that they’ll love listening to over and over again,” explained Skyrocket CEO Nelo Lucich. “It’s always been a dream to have toys come to life and now it’s possible with AI. Poe the AI Story Bear takes the positive aspects of AI technology and makes it accessible to all types of consumers from diverse backgrounds and languages at an affordable price.”
Toy Story with artificial intelligence
Of course, in the case of a children’s product, safety is a major concern. To allay concerns, Skyrocket has designed Poe to only pull information from the app, so there are no cameras, microphones or direct internet access – just Bluetooth to link the mobile device. There are also stricter than usual security measures on the content that the AI model suggests for the story. That’s why the choices of themes and characters are also carefully selected, limiting the chance of anything inappropriate coming up unintentionally.
Poe’s high-tech power is surprisingly affordable at $50. Skyrocket has ambitions to develop a full line of toys with AI-powered features, but the real question is whether parents will see Poe as their kids’ more talkative Buzz Lightyear or a sinister modern-day Furby.
