This week, trying to take a photograph of an Instagram my oldest grandson posted, I accidentally got Siri instead. I went,” Oh! No! Not Siri!.” Siri responded, “After all I do for you . . . .” In hysterics over the guilt trip Siri pulled on me, I called my grandson immediately. The entire family has been laughing ever since.
This Grandma has “caught” the seven year old grandson having a long conversation with Siri and the older grandson asking Siri the most ridiculous questions. Siri has become a “pal” to many children, but do we really want this to go farther? Do we want Siri to know what goes on in our homes and to save the information through the children in the family for marketing and other purposes?
“Companies like Mattel are readying electronic toys that will use Web connections to talk back to children, raising some concerns about privacy,” was the blurb introducing concerns about a new Barbie, in “A Wi-Fi Barbie Doll With the Soul of Siri,” New York Times, March 28, 2015. The author, Natash Singer, introduces us to Martin Reddy and Oren Jacob, the co-founders of ToyTalk. “Founded in 2011, ToyTalk already produces popular animated conversational apps – among them the Winston Show and SpeakaZoo – that encourage young children to engage in complex dialogue with a menagerie of make-believe characters. Now the company’s technology, originally designed for two-dimensional characters on-screen, is poised to power tangible playthings that children hold in their hands.”
“To converse with a mobile device is an assumed truth if you are 10 years old today,” Oren Jacob, the chief executive of ToyTalk, a company that creates conversational characters for children, told me recently at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. “That is not true of high school students.”
So when is this onslaught of interactive talking toys going to hit? This Grandma bets it is in time for holiday purchases. I wonder if “Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses” is going to sell out when she is released in the fall.
“She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.”
We already know that children spending hours watching television or on electronics is not in their best interests. This Grandma surely does not want a grandchild conversing with a machine for hours. It seems experts think these new toys can significantly affect learning.
“The advent of connected toys that can record and talk back to children is likely to deepen this debate over the Internet of Things because of the potential for these intelligent toys to powerfully affect children’s imagination, learning and social development. A recent study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University, for instance, compared two groups of toddlers. One group played with plush toys that had been preprogrammed to say the child’s name, and to say that they had the same favorite food and song as the child; the other played with plush toys that called each child “Pal” and liked different things. When the same toy character on-screen presented math skills – like arranging cups in order of size – the first group of toddlers performed better than those who played with less-personalized plush toys. Sandra L. Calvert, the director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown and the lead author of the study, said that toys able to personalize their responses to children in real time could have an even greater effect on them. “These could be real cutting-edge approaches to facilitate children’s learning,” Dr. Calvert told me. But, she added, the toys’ impact would depend largely on the depth and breadth of their conversational abilities. “It’s only as good as the programmer,” she said.”
Ms. Singer reports that Nicole A. Ozer, the director of technology and civil liberties at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California asks the following questions: “What is being recorded? How long is it being stored? Who is it being shared with?. . . . ToyTalk also developed a privacy process intended to give parents some control over their children’s personal information. Before a child under 13 can use the conversation feature of the apps, a parent has to give permission and confirm it via email. When children want to interact with a character, they press a microphone button on the app like a walkie-talkie. Parents also have access to their child’s recorded conversations and can, if they choose, delete them. . . . In a statement, Mattel said the company was “committed to safety and security” and that Hello Barbie’s technology included “a number of safeguards to ensure that stored data is secure and can’t be accessed by unauthorized users.” Is Mattel considering itself and its marketing department an authorized user?
Can good come of this new wave of interactive talking toys?
Some say yes. “ If ToyTalk has any influence, however, Hello Barbie, rather than dooming children’s privacy, could just as well usher in a new era of interactive playthings where children can develop elaborate conversations with toys similar to the way Minecraft players build out entire landscapes,” according to Ms. Singer.
This Grandma has concerns, not only about usage and privacy, but also who is controlling the message to our precious grandchildren. Ms. Singer reports that “ToyTalk and Mattel executives are fully aware that children’s advocates and feminists will be watching closely to see whether Hello Barbie challenges girls to think deeply or perpetuates beauty and gender stereotypes. Last fall, for instance, Mattel faced withering scorn when critics discovered that a children’s book titled “Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer” showed the character seeking help from male friends to code a game.”
“Everybody involved is very aware of how carefully this content needs to be crafted,” Michael Shore, head of consumer insights at Mattel, told [Ms. Singer] earlier this week about Hello Barbie. “With this powerful a technology, this is something we need to be hypervigilant about.”
This Grandma’s message is we too need to be hypervigilant this coming holiday season. This IS a powerful technology and we are not yet sure what control it will have over our grandchildren. Maybe the cost will just be too high for the 2015 holiday gift season. We can only hope.
Joy,
Mema
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