Tech reports covering today’s iteration of the impending AI revolution show that a new kids’ toy is making history as it heads to the New York Toy Fair later this month.
Remember those toy kitchens? There, many of us baked our first plastic muffins, loaded up plastic bread slices with plastic bacon and eggs, and turned those little toy timers to make sure that our culinary creations turned out just right – (albeit not in edible form!)
A new kids’ toy kitchen playset works with Amazon Alexa technology to basically introduce a sentient kitchen that will give your kid recommendations or instructions, and generally interact with your child. Food and cookware pieces have RFID chips, so that the playset knows what your child is doing from moment to moment.
Reports from CNet also show that unlike today’s conventional smart home device, the new toy kitchen’s Alexa system will not require the user to say its name before chiming in with anything from how to boil spaghetti, to ticking off lists of ingredients that might be helpful in your kid’s imaginary soup or salad.
Retailing for $300, this trailblazing toy shows just how affordable, pervasive and offhand artificial intelligence has become in this our year 2020 A.D.
Decades ago, you would pay the same $300 for a kitchen playset that was basically inert. Now, we get the same general applications and engines underneath our smart refrigerators and capable oven-range models for our child’s kitchen playset. One could argue that this addition is going to help children transition to being grown-ups in the age of the digitally connected world and mature artificial intelligence options. Then, on the other hand, one could point to any number of privacy questions that pertain to adult interactions with AI as well.
In any case, this new kitchen set is an excellent illustration of how artificial intelligence is being casually integrated into everything that we own and use.
