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December 5, 2013 10:36 am GMT
Today the talking iPad app The Winston Show from ToyTalk gets two new scenarios based on classic movie genres. The skethc called In the Movies has a film noir segment called Winston Sly, Private Eye and a sci-fi jaunt called Squabble Amongst the Stars. We’ve covered ToyTalk before, but it continues to be fascinating because of the underlying technology. Yes, it’s a kids entertainment app for the iPad, but it’s created by talent culled from the Artificial Intelligence Center atSRI international (the company that spawned Siri) andPixar, among others. The company has raised over $16M from Greylock, Charles River Ventures, True Ventures and First Round Capital and a number of angels.It’s using artificial intelligence and voice recognition to build a framework that’s working towards full-on conversational technology that will allow our machines to talk back to us. We talked to CEO Oren Jacob — a former Pixar CTO — about the latest update to the app. The two new episodes, he says, came about because kids seemed to really love it when theybecame the characters. The previous content in The Winston Show was focused on a ‘game show’ environment where the kid played ‘themselves’ on a show hosted by the eponymous Winston. He would converse back and forth with them using tons of dialogue written and recorded by ToyTalk, and the company’s AI engine to determine the proper responses. The new episodes in the app use the iPad’s camera to place kids right in the scenes, allowing them to ‘become’ an alien themselves. This immersion helps them to place themselves into the scenario and be more engaged in dialogue. In the film noir episode, for instance, the kids take on the role of the suspect, and Winston grills them on ‘who made the mess in their room’. The kids can say just about anything back, and Winston either answers or fills in the blanks with noncomittal language. As ToyTalk gets the feedback from the app, it can see what the most popular responses coming in that Winston is unable to reply to and it can add in dialog to fill those gaps. In September, ToyTalk launched The Winston Show with around 6 hours of content, which translated to about 8-9 hours of gameplay. By January, it hopes to have around 12 hours of content for kids to partake in. Jacob says that as they observed usage patterns, some interesting data
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/f390TnHf0iw/
ToyTalk Isnt Just Entertaining Our Kids, Its Teaching Our Machines To Converse
Today the talking iPad app The Winston Show from ToyTalk gets two new scenarios based on classic movie genres. The skethc called In the Movies has a film noir segment called Winston Sly, Private Eye and a sci-fi jaunt called Squabble Amongst the Stars. We’ve covered ToyTalk before, but it continues to be fascinating because of the underlying technology. Yes, it’s a kids entertainment app for the iPad, but it’s created by talent culled from the Artificial Intelligence Center atSRI international (the company that spawned Siri) andPixar, among others. The company has raised over $16M from Greylock, Charles River Ventures, True Ventures and First Round Capital and a number of angels.It’s using artificial intelligence and voice recognition to build a framework that’s working towards full-on conversational technology that will allow our machines to talk back to us. We talked to CEO Oren Jacob — a former Pixar CTO — about the latest update to the app. The two new episodes, he says, came about because kids seemed to really love it when theybecame the characters. The previous content in The Winston Show was focused on a ‘game show’ environment where the kid played ‘themselves’ on a show hosted by the eponymous Winston. He would converse back and forth with them using tons of dialogue written and recorded by ToyTalk, and the company’s AI engine to determine the proper responses. The new episodes in the app use the iPad’s camera to place kids right in the scenes, allowing them to ‘become’ an alien themselves. This immersion helps them to place themselves into the scenario and be more engaged in dialogue. In the film noir episode, for instance, the kids take on the role of the suspect, and Winston grills them on ‘who made the mess in their room’. The kids can say just about anything back, and Winston either answers or fills in the blanks with noncomittal language. As ToyTalk gets the feedback from the app, it can see what the most popular responses coming in that Winston is unable to reply to and it can add in dialog to fill those gaps. In September, ToyTalk launched The Winston Show with around 6 hours of content, which translated to about 8-9 hours of gameplay. By January, it hopes to have around 12 hours of content for kids to partake in. Jacob says that as they observed usage patterns, some interesting dataOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/f390TnHf0iw/
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