She speaks when spoken to, she's a teacher's pet … heck, she's got a photographic memory. Chips and cams and computer programs – that's what Cindy Smart is made of.
Even though she's just 5 years old, Cindy Smart speaks five languages. She's a good reader. She can tell time and do simple math, including multiplication and division.
She's not a prodigy. She's just good programming.
Cindy looks like an average doll – 18½ inches of blond hair, baby-blue eyes, and a button nose. But loaded with a digital camera, microprocessor, and voice recognition software, Cindy is the first doll that can see, think, and do as she's told. That makes her both surprisingly precocious … and a little creepy. When introduced by Toy Quest at conventions around the nation earlier this year, the doll spooked viewers as she read and counted out loud. "It was just startling," says Karl Busche, a toy industry veteran. "If the Stepford Wives had babies, this is what they would be like." Busche, a buyer for the Home Shopping Network, signed up to sell 500 dolls on HSN this July, in advance of her debut on store shelves this fall with a $100 price tag.
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Photo by James Chiang "Sell Mattel @ $20…"
The eagle-eyed Cindy follows in the path of other breakthrough toys like Chatty Cathy, whose pull-string statements shook up the doll market 40 years ago, or Sony's barking Aibo robot, which was the first to popularize voice command in the late '90s. Cindy takes Aibo's innovations one step beyond: She not only follows instructions but intuits shapes, colors, and words — and remembers. The effect is a doll that appears to be learning.
Toy Quest, which also produces Tonka trucks and Tekno the robotic puppy, spent a decade trying to see how much human nature it could breathe into an inanimate object. Engineers began researching basic and affordable artificial intelligence, creating minibots that sense light, sounds, and pressure. "They could send digital infrared signals to one another and even judge distances," explains Bob Del Principe, VP of R&D. "Without the sense of sight, it seemed like we were lacking one of the most keen abilities that life-forms use to react to their environment."
So how do they make a doll actually see? In Cindy's case, it's a multistep process. Ask "Can you read this?" and her voice recognition software identifies it as one of 70 preprogrammed commands. Then the lo-res digicam scans a 15-degree radius in search of number- or letter-shaped objects (she even recognizes handwriting). Buried in her belly, Cindy's 16-bit microprocessor — an upgrade from the toy industry standard 4-bit — compares the text with her database of 700 words. It's a match: "I love you," she says.
Now if she can just learn to use an Easy-Bake oven …
