When the movie "Teddy Bear" becomes a reality, a plush toy that can only talk, interact, and even sense the owner's emotions is gradually replacing traditional toys and becoming a favorite for adults and children. New favorite.

In recent years, AI has become the latest “traffic password” in all walks of life, and brands have labeled their products with AI in exchange for higher market competitiveness and attention.

The toy industry is no exception. Many companies have deployed in the field of AI companion toys, including not only traditional toy manufacturers (Aofei Entertainment, Shifeng Culture, etc.), but also technology companies (ByteDance, Teifeng Culture, etc.) Sla, FoloToy, etc.). They each have advantages in product development, IP accumulation, self-developed large models, etc., and have successively launched new products.

From the family companion robot LOVOT of the Japanese robotics company GROOVE The conspicuous bag of AI companion dolls made of large bean bags, Tesla’s robot toy Tesla Bot Action Figure...

These AI companion toys of different shapes have achieved amazing success as soon as they were launched. Surprising results. BubblePal, with an official price of 449 yuan, had a GMV of over 4 million in the first month of sale; Tesla’s Tesla Bot Action Figure, with an official price of 40 US dollars, was sold out in less than 24 hours after it went online in the official store, and the second-hand market price even soared to $1,300.

Such a hit product effect has made the public gradually realize that compared to traditional hardware such as mobile phones, computers, headphones, and watches, seemingly inconspicuous toys may have the most potential in the AI ​​to C track. direction.

With reference to data released by the Joint Research Institute of Industry, the global AI toy market is expected to grow from approximately US$8.7 billion in 2022 to US$35.11 billion in 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 16%.

The market is vast, and the number of competitors entering the market is also increasing. Although the market is generally optimistic, there are too many predecessors who have failed in the AI ​​​​track, making it difficult not to doubt: Can AI companion toys really succeed?

To answer this question, we have to start with the product. To this end, "Focus One" has sorted out the main information about the companies currently involved in AI toys and their products:

Note: Only the main companies are counted

AI companion toys currently on the market There are many types and different names. From the perspective of product form, mainstream AI companion toys mainly include three directions: "dolls/plush toys", "intelligent hardware" and "robots", which look like this:

Moflin in the form of plush toy Source/Vanguard Industries

BubblePal in the form of hardware (note, it is a pendant, not a bear) Source/Yueran Innovation

Tesla Bot Action Figure in robot form Source/Tesla Mall

Although the final forms of the three types of products are different, the core functions are basically the same, including speech recognition, natural language processing and machine learning. To put it simply, AI companion toys hope to interact with users in multiple dimensions such as sight, hearing, and touch through human-like, animal-like, and IP-like ways.

In terms of price, the gap between different products is very large. From AI smart hardware that can be purchased for 10 yuan to AI robots that cost 30,000 yuan, many factors are involved. In addition to the difference in product technology costs, more importantly, the toy industry itself has a premium due to the popularity of IP. Traditionally, this has led to huge differences in the pricing of AI companion toys, and there is a certain degree of decoupling between function and price.

According to function, AI companion toys can be mainly divided into three routes.

The first type focuses on entertainment. Through vision, sound sensors and AI technology, the product can recognize human actions and emotions and learn to respond over a long period of time. Its main purpose is to provide users with emotional values ​​such as entertainment and companionship.

For example, the AI ​​pet Moflin jointly developed by Casio and Japanese start-up Vanguard Industries, the AI ​​robot pet Ropet released by Mengyou Intelligent, and the innovative AIGC toy pendant BubblePal, etc. They can chat and interact with their owners and can change their emotions in a variety of ways, including anger, sadness, happiness, and react like real creatures.

Entertainment products are also the most popular AI companion toys currently, especially for companies with high-profile IP.

The second is the educational direction, which adds language, mathematics, programming and other knowledge on the basis of interaction. By combining voice, image and tactile feedback, it enhances children's learning experience and improves the efficiency of knowledge absorption.

The AI ​​early childhood education robot launched by Huohuo Rabbit and the AI ​​Magic Star of Shifeng Culture are going in this direction. Such products generally support AI story co-creation for families and customized storytelling in the voices of parents. , AI full-scenario Q&A and continuous dialogue and other functions.

The third is the health direction. Health here is not limited to exercise incentives and the detection of health data such as steps and sleep, but also companionship and care for special groups such as autistic children. Compared with the universality of AI companion toys in the previous two directions, health products are a more niche segment, but AI companion toys are equally important to special groups.

As early as 2018, the MIT Media Lab developed aA companion robot that can make expressions is used to solve the problem of expression recognition difficulties for children with autism. Coincidentally, NAO, a humanoid robot produced by SoftBank, conveys different emotions by changing the color of its eyes, the movements of its limbs and the pitch of its voice. It can also achieve the purpose of teaching autistic children how to identify fear, sadness or happiness.

Taken together, the first and second types are currently the mainstream of AI companion toys. Entertainment products are aimed at users of all ages, while educational products focus on children, perhaps to increase product competition. Therefore, companies often add entertainment and companion functions to educational products. The third product is currently a bit cold.

Before AI companion toys became popular, countless companies had already carried out AI transformation on a series of hardware such as mobile phones, smart watches, TVs, glasses, smart speakers, and learning machines. The AI ​​functions they support are similar. In addition to adjustments and optimizations in terms of picture quality and sound quality for the hardware form, functions such as natural dialogue and AI generation are almost standard features of every AI hardware, making it difficult for users to feel the uniqueness.

The key to this phenomenon is that the principle of most AI hardware is to install software on various forms of hardware and connect to large models through API calls to interact with users. Some companies rely on self-research for their large models, while others use technology from third-party partners.

The same is true for AI companion toys. If an AI companion toy is disassembled, its hardware part usually includes chips, sensors, speakers, microphones, batteries, etc.; the software part covers speech recognition technology, AI technology, etc. Models etc. Compared with traditional toys, the soul of AI companion toys is the small movement. With the help of the movement, AI companion toys can use TTS (text-to-speech) technology to achieve a high degree of anthropomorphism. It can not only smoothly convert text into speech, but also imitate subtle changes in human speech, making interaction more natural and friendly.

Technically speaking, the routes taken by AI accompanying toys are also different.

There is a type of toy companies that access large third-party models, especially companies that already have well-known IPs. For example, Aofei Entertainment's Pleasant Goat Super Bell Doll combines the "Pleasant Goat" image with Xiaobing's big language model to provide AI smart chat; Huohuo Rabbit's AI early education learning machine is equipped with iFlytek's large AI model.

The other type has no IP, only provides hardware, and "resurrects" old toys. For example, the innovative BubblePal is a bubble ball pendant. When worn on an ordinary doll, it can be transformed into an AI companion toy. Users can freely create characters, or choose and talk to classic characters such as Princess Elsa and Lodi provided by BubblePal.

There is also a category that sells both finished toys and “AI movements”. For example, the start-up company FoloToy, the team independently develops AI hardware and algorithms, in addition to directly selling AI Fire Rabbit, AI cactus and other finished toys, they also sell "AI movements" that can be installed into any ordinary toys.

In fact, just from the perspective of implementation effects, these toys are relatively similar in function and underlying technology to devices such as smart speakers equipped with large models. But why are AI companion toys so popular?

Compared with other AI hardware, the advantage of AI companion toys lies in the carrier. The carrier form of dolls, pets and well-known IPs makes their interactive experience and feedback significantly superior to cold machines in terms of senses, especially among children, this advantage is even more prominent.

“On his birthday, 5-year-old Lele received a milk dragon AI doll bought for him by his aunt. Since then, he has taken it with him when he eats and sleeps, and he doesn’t pester us as usual.” Ms. Cheng introduced the changes brought about by AI toys to "Focus One", her expression seemed a bit complicated, she said: "AI toys It does share a part of the companionship for parents, but they are also worried that the parent-child relationship will be diluted by the toys. ”

In fact, parents’ needs for AI companion toys mainly focus on education, safety, interaction, and strengthening parent-child relationships. In several aspects, current mainstream products mainly focus on the above aspects for iterative optimization. For adults and the elderly, their expectations for AI companion toys also include more complex emotional support.

Take the AI ​​robot pet Ropet unveiled at the "Technology Spring Festival Gala" CES 2025 exhibition as an example. The official introduction is that it can simulate a real living body to the greatest extent, with body temperature, hunger and other reactions, and the interactive process It will recognize the user's emotions and respond accordingly. As the degree of interaction deepens, the intimacy and growth value will continue to increase, and it will learn the owner's facial expressions and habits.

AI Robot Pet Ropet Source / Mengyou Intelligence

The realization of this function relies on small model training in the vertical field and supports more complex multi-modal perception.

Yueran Innovation executives also introduced to the media that when the BubblePal product opens a dialogue, it mainly uses a two-layer model, which is the structure of the bottom general large model + vertical small model. Its main partners include MiniMax, Doubao, and Zhipu.

A consumer said that AI companion toys can only truly attract them to buy if they are intelligent and personalized. And this also puts forward higher requirements for technology.

The industry is currently generally optimistic about AI companion toys, whether the market size is as high as 2023 The global toy market of US$183 billion, or the trend of the demand for plush toys spreading to all age groups under the millet economy, makes it impossible to ignore this new track with a predicted market size of tens of billions.

The cake is big enough, but it does not mean that everyone can eat it. If you want to survive, you must form your own core barriers.

In terms of technology, as mentioned earlier, AI accompanying toysThe core is the "movement", which is the large model called behind. When the track becomes crowded, competition among companies will inevitably revolve around large models. Regardless of whether they choose large models developed by themselves or third-party partners, companies need to conduct training in vertical fields so that the large models can run in with the selected hardware carrier to achieve better results. With the changes in hardware size and form, AI companion toys will most likely involve the choice of pure client side, pure cloud side, or even a hybrid large model solution. How to balance the factors of computing power and cost will be what enterprises need to consider. problem.

At the same time, this process requires the accumulation of large amounts of high-quality data. In the field of AI companion toys, high-quality data includes high-quality dialogue, emotions, expressions, body language, and semantic understanding. This data requires professional teams to screen, clean and label it, which consumes a lot of manpower and resources. It is the focus of corporate competition and determines the differentiated performance of products.

Photo source / Douban "Teddy Bear Ted" official stills

Secondly, the key to user experience lies in whether the toy can truly understand and respond to user emotions. Multimodal emotional capabilities and memory architecture are key. The former affects the toy's recognition of the user's emotions, while the latter is the factor that allows the toy to remember the user's preferences and truly become the user's "friend".

In addition, how to ensure the accuracy of information during the interaction process is also a major technical problem. Large models may "hallucinate" when generating content (i.e. generate information that is inconsistent with the facts), which may be misleading to users, especially children.

In terms of business model, the current cost of AI companion toys is mainly concentrated on the AI ​​solutions they carry. Although the price of the product is much higher than that of traditional toys, long-term payment of calling fees to large model manufacturers is still an expense that cannot be ignored.

In this regard, some companies have developed a subscription service model for the C-end market, that is, users can use it for free for a certain number of years, and subsequent use requires a subscription fee, otherwise the product will no longer be able to be used. For example, the subscription fee for FoloToy and Yueran Innovation is 99 yuan per year. This model will obviously have a certain impact on users. After all, almost no toys have adopted this annual payment model before.

For the B-side market, the model is clearer. Companies can sell proven AI solutions to other toy companies. But it may face the problem of indirectly creating competitors for itself.

In addition to technology and business models, AI companion toys also need to pay attention to privacy protection issues. In the process of users interacting with toys, their voice, expressions, hobbies and even living environment may be collected and processed. This opens up possibilities for product optimization, but also raises concerns about data misuse.

Generally speaking, the core of AI companion toys is always to help users cope with real-life difficulties, rather than letting people indulge in the virtual world or escape from reality. This is essentially the same as traditional AI companion software and games. the difference.

New wine in old bottles may bring surprises. How to innovate and use technologyFinding a balance between user experience and business model will determine the future winner of this track.