Fisher-Price knows how to make an interactive toy that is both fun to play with and technologically innovative. The latest installment of the Sesame Street Elmo doll to be sold in October, 2008, looks pretty amazing. The new Elmo Live can sing and dance, stand up and sit down, tell jokes and stories. The video below is from a recent demonstration showcasing Elmo Live.
So, anyone reading this blog regularly should probably be wondering at this point as to why I bother to talk about Elmo Live. At the end of the day, this is an AI and robotics blog. So, is the new Elmo an intelligent agent and a robot? First of all, depending on what definition of an intelligent agent you accept then Elmo could be thought of as an AI agent. Under the definition that considers an intelligent agent as one that can sense its environment and react accordingly, Elmo Live is an intelligent agent. It has lots of sensors spread out throughout its body and it responds according to the stimuli it receives. Whether it is a robot or not is not a difficult question to answer. Being an intelligent agent and having a physical body qualifies it as a robot.
In addition, Elmo Live is a very affordable robot because according to Fisher-Price when it goes on sale in October it will cost no more than $60. Expect it to be the hottest toy for the 2008 holiday period.
In conclusion, the creators of Elmo Live have shown the world how to create an engaging and fun interactive toy which may not be capable of general artificial intelligence and learning from experience but it is the best one can do given current AI and robotics technology, especially for $60. Some other people in the same market should learn a lesson or two from Fisher-Price and I won't name names!
4 comments:
8:58 PM
Pretty cool, although I would have liked to see more interaction and less monologue. I wonder what the tether was for- presumably the smarts were running off-board and will eventually be embedded. There's a toy that could really use vision. ;-)
2:00 AM
"Some people could learn from this?" Yeah, those bastards from Ugobe :)
10:00 PM
@Rob
It is a toy and it is designed to entertain little kids so I doubt that the latest and greatest in technology is necessary. Ugobe tried to do the latter and they created a boring, useless and hardly entertaining robot/toy.
Also, I don't know what that cable/tether is about but since it is a prototype and not in production yet, I would agree with you that the smart are running off-board (I'm also guessing it could be for power since the demo was probably much longer than the video posted.)
11:05 AM
Elmo Live is pretty cool. It's like having your own little Muppet. Wait a minute....is that cool?
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