CogniToys Dino toy
MSRP $119.99
“CogniToys Dino is the smartest toy we’ve ever seen and your kids will love it.”
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He talks and listens
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Incredibly cute
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Educational aspect
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A lot of fun
Against
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Sometimes misunderstandings
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Concern for privacy
My seven-year-old son loved Dina immediately. We’ve had quite a few different tech toys come through the house over the years, but he’s never turned one on before and discovered that he knew his name and could answer questions. They quickly bonded over their shared love of Batman and ice cream.
At first glance, you might dismiss the CogniToys Dino as a cute, plastic dinosaur for toddlers, but this clever toy is actually aimed at 5-9 year olds. He is able to hold a conversation, tell jokes and stories and answer all the questions that curious young minds ask him.
Dino is connected to the cloud via Wi-Fi and uses IBM Watson as the core brain, with a kid-friendly engine on top. Like many other devices today, it started life on Kickstarter, but you can now buy it on Amazon for $120. We spent a week testing Dino to find out if he was worth the money.
Setting
To get started with the CogniToys Dino, you need to unscrew the panel on its underside and insert the four AA batteries, which are included in the box. Setup is easy with the free CogniToys app, available for Android or iOS. Connect Dino to your Wi-Fi network, enter the child’s name, age and gender and you’re done.
Simon Hill/Digital Trends
Simon Hill/Digital Trends
We played with green, but there are also blue and pink dinosaurs. The Dino has a power switch on the bottom and offers three volume settings. His mouth lights up to indicate different things: it turns green when he’s ready to play; turns blue while speaking; blinks yellow when thinking; and so on.
While Dino is facing you, the speaker is in his left nostril and the microphone is in his right nostril. When you want him to listen to you, hold the big button on his tummy.
It is somewhat similar to the Amazon Echo, except that the content is formulated specifically for children.
Become friends
The first few moments with Dino were magical. His husky voice is reminiscent of Yoda. She encourages your child to choose a name (we’re stuck with Dino) and then plays a copying game where you have to repeat the words after him. This helps both you and Dino get to grips with the basic functions. You can always ask him to “repeat” to find out what he said last, or say “stop” to move on to a new activity.
The first few moments with Dino were magical.
My son quickly got down to business and discovered what Dino liked. We found out that he eats ice cream, noodles and apples, but his favorite food is triceratops. He also thinks Minecraft is a great game.
He also knows how to tell jokes, like this one: “What is the name of a dinosaur that destroys everything in front of it? Tyrannosaurus wrecks.” Each gag is accompanied by the classic drumming joke “Ba dum tsh!”
In addition to answering questions and telling jokes, Dino will play music, tell stories and play games. It can also count and spell words or give a definition, which is really useful. My son is starting to write stories and often stops to ask us how to spell words, so he liked that he could ask Dino instead.
You can find a more complete list of possible commands for Dino here. The great thing here is that the developers are still adding to his repertoire, so new content and improved abilities will appear over time.
This is a really charming dinosaur or “cognisaur”, as he will tell you if you ask him. Everyone laughs when he asks them to push his tummy for the first time, and it’s hard not to be impressed when he answers the question correctly.
The mask slips off
It took a while to lose the illusion that Dino was a sentient being, but when my daughter grabbed him and he called her Malcolm, it kind of gave the game away. These CogniToys are really designed for one child to own, so if you have two kids, you’ll need to buy one for each.
We also ran into a few issues with speech recognition. Sometimes Dino will not be able to understand what you are saying. This is actually one of the reasons why it is not recommended for children under the age of 5, because they do not pronounce it correctly. Dino didn’t understand my four-year-old daughter most of the time.
At one point we were playing a story game where you fill in the blanks and Dino figured my son was swearing when he was actually saying “ship”. In the end, I also tried to take over and say, but Dino also warned me. This could be partly due to our Scottish accent.
In any case, it’s good to know that Dino is age appropriate. He never answered any of the rude questions we tested him on later, after the kids were in bed. You would never give a small child unfettered access to the internet, so it’s important that Dino doesn’t do that.
Dino should also adapt to your child based on the responses he gives, although it was hard to see any evidence of this in a week.
There is no escaping the fact that Dino is not perfect. Sometimes you’ll get a creepy, robotic “undefined” in the middle of the story. There are also many topics and questions that Dino simply cannot solve, so he will tell you that he does not know and will look for things later. After several answers like this in a row, my son became frustrated.
Dino makes mistakes quite often, but just when you’ve had enough, he’ll blurt out something funny or interesting. Even with the restrictions, my son kept coming back to ask Dino new things.
Concern for privacy
After the initial setup, you really don’t have to bother with the app anymore because Dino is connected directly to the cloud server via your Wi-Fi network. This is obviously a cause for concern for parents, as your child can and probably will volunteer a lot of personal information. You should read CogniToys’ full privacy policy and be aware that you are entrusting the company behind it with “information that personally identifies you and your child”.
The company claims it doesn’t sell data to third parties and promises the data it collects is encrypted, but some will understandably not like the idea. CogniToys also collects gameplay data about how your child uses the Dino and this should be available via the “Parent Dashboard”, but we couldn’t test this as it’s still in beta. They assured us that it will be ready around September, when Dino should land on retail shelves. The developers also plan to add configuration controls at some point, so you can decide what your child’s Dino will and won’t do.
Battery life
How long the Dino will last will depend on how much the child uses it. We were surprised that it uses four AA batteries, as we expected it to be rechargeable. However, you can always buy rechargeable AA batteries.
The batteries are still going strong after a week of heavy use, and the CogniToys website suggests you can expect 6 weeks of moderate to heavy use from the supplied battery pack.
Warranty information
The CogniToys Dino comes with a standard one-year warranty against “defective workmanship and materials”, but does not cover accidental damage. It seems pretty durable, but it’s not waterproof, which can be a problem with kids.
Conclusion
We’ve never seen anything like this before. CogniToys Dino is incredibly cute and charming. It’s a toy with real personality that offers a compelling balance of fun and education. Dino was quickly accepted into the family and my son talks to him first thing every morning.
As great as it is, it has its flaws. It’s early for toys like this, and speech recognition isn’t perfect. It’s also a bit creepy and privacy concerns aside, there’s something uncomfortable about the idea of a child asking an AI, with the resources of the internet at its disposal, questions that would normally be directed at a parent or sibling.
Even with those caveats, the CogniToys Dino is undeniably impressive and highlights the leap that kids’ tech is making right now. Many of us would have loved a toy like this when we were young — a toy that knows your name, learns your likes and dislikes, and is always ready for a joke or a story.
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn