The AI wave is sweeping from the cloud to edge devices, and now even children's toys are getting a "brain" upgrade. AI innovation technology company BRAVO iDEAS today (January 20th) announced an emotional AI toy solution that combines a high-performance AI chip with a Large Language Model (LLM). They also announced a collaboration with the well-known toy brand Wild Beasts. Their technology emphasizes giving toys "character souls," transforming them from mere plastic products that make canned sounds into intelligent companions that understand human speech and have emotional responses.
Infuse the character with "soul" and strictly adhere to the toy character design.
The current smart toy market has attracted active participation from companies in Japan and China, targeting the massive children's education market and even the growing demand for companionship among the elderly. However, traditional interactive toys are limited by chip computing power and pre-programmed logic, resulting in monotonous interactive modes that often fail to meet the needs of extended companionship scenarios.
Lu Yizhi, CEO of Creative Ideas, pointed out that the core of the solution launched this time lies in "built-in character soul AI". Through localized text and video data training (especially since Creative Ideas itself has a lot of short video training data), and combined with the computing power of high-performance AI chips and cloud-based large language models, the toys can have speech recognition, natural language understanding (NLU) and emotion perception capabilities.
Most importantly, the creative idea emphasizes strict "character limitations" for the AI. For example, if it's a toy featuring a superhero character, it can only answer questions that align with the character's worldview and personality, and won't suddenly start talking to children about the stock market or inappropriate information. This not only ensures immersion (without exceeding the toy character's personality settings), but more importantly, by limiting the scope of its responses, it also prevents problems such as AI hallucinations, significantly improving safety for children.
Regarding privacy and security, Lu Yizhi emphasized that the technology behind the creative ideas will not affect user privacy. Although the toys using his technology have interactive memory capabilities and can distinguish different interactive objects, there will be no situation where parents use the toys to ask their children what they have been doing lately, or children use the toys to ask their parents if they have secretly entered their rooms, which would affect privacy.
In terms of technical architecture, the current service is built on the AWS cloud platform. Through cloud connectivity, the toy's knowledge base can be continuously updated via a subscription model. Lu Yizhi also revealed that as the business expands, future cooperation with Google Cloud (GCP) or Microsoft Azure is not ruled out, and Google Cloud has even expressed interest in engaging with them.
Partnering with Wild Beast Kingdom, integrating hardware and software to conquer the all-age market.
Although Creative Ideas started with software technology, its business model currently positions it as an "arms dealer," providing core technologies such as chips and large-scale language models, without manufacturing IP hardware itself. In this collaboration with Wild Things Kingdom, Wild Things Kingdom handles the complex toy IP licensing negotiations and defines the toy's "personality," while Creative Ideas is responsible for implementing these interactive functions.
In collaboration with creative ideas, Yang Yongliang, chairman of Wild Beast Kingdom, expressed his hope to create more development and playability for toys, rather than just making toys static displays or collections. However, he also emphasized that he would be extra careful in introducing advanced technologies such as AI, especially when toys interact with different age groups, and would ensure that AI does not produce unnecessary negative effects.
In addition to focusing on using AI to give toy characters personality, Yang Yongliang revealed that Wild Beast Kingdom is also continuously exploring more application possibilities and investing in more development opportunities.
On the other hand, Creative Ideas also emphasizes that "companionship for all ages" will be its key development direction in the future. In particular, as Taiwan will enter an aging society, the demand for companionship among the elderly will inevitably increase significantly as the young population gradually decreases. Therefore, it is expected that its technology will be applied to elderly care to provide functions such as chatting to relieve boredom and even health reminders.
Future Outlook: From Toys to "Jarvis"
Regarding his vision for the future, Lu Yizhi said that although many businesses have inquired about the potential of the adult companionship market, he will still prioritize family and companionship for young and old at this stage.
However, given that creative ideas can also incorporate visual analysis and other functions into AI models, these highly interactive AI vehicles are very likely to develop into personal intelligent assistants similar to "Jarvis" in the movie "Iron Man" (industries including OpenAI have already begun to make such plans), and it is even possible that creative ideas will launch their own branded products in the future.
In addition, Lu Yizhi emphasized that he has the technology to create customized models. In particular, most short video services in the Chinese market are based on creative ideas, so he can achieve interactive experiences such as keyword-free AI functions and accelerated AI response speed. However, he will not invest in general large-scale language models like those currently produced by European and American companies. Instead, he will focus on small customized language models with about 140 billion parameters, which can be applied to various terminal devices and customized according to different scenarios.
