JEvery second German child has a small cube with ears on it. If you place a pawn on it, the colorful box plays a radio play. “Toniebox” is the name of the product that the Düsseldorf manufacturer has now sold five million times. Artificial intelligence (AI) could now find its way into children’s rooms via these boxes. According to WELT information, the Tonies company wants to use new software that creates and reads short stories based on the ideas and keywords of the young users. Using ChatGPT.
So far, it’s the job of millions of fathers and mothers. When the little ones crawl into bed, they don’t want to sleep, they want to be told a story first. And we would be happy to do so with concrete specifications as to what they should be about. A nice, if often tiring ritual for both sides, which could be radically simplified with the help of automation.
In a few days, the Tonies company wants to test a new service for 1,000 customers, with which children can delegate the thinking up and telling of fantasy stories to the AI instead of their parents. “We want to give children playful access to a technology that will accompany them throughout their lives,” says digital boss Christian Sprinkmeyer. “But safety always comes first,” he insists.
The trigger for the innovation was a private problem at the home of a programmer. “My daughter didn’t want to fall asleep, and I was faced with the task of coming up with a story for an eight-year-old,” explains developer Sebastian Heide-Meyer zu Erpen. Faced with this challenge, the IT expert came up with a potentially far-reaching idea. He sat down at his computer, called up the website of the AI service ChatGPT, which had just been introduced, and commissioned it to do the thinking. It worked. The daughter fell asleep after the story and a product idea was awakened.
Meyer’s colleague Christine Maiwald demonstrates in advance on her computer what has become of it after a few weeks of development work. She has opened an input field and is feeding the computer with a few keywords. “The superhero should be called Lottie and be five years old,” she muses.
There should be a fight with a caries monster, an educational toothbrush and at the end fireworks. Complete. Maiwald types in the key points and presses a red button: create a story. An orange-red progress bar at the bottom of the screen shows: The AI is making up a story.
Audio book box with “child safety”
After about 40 seconds, the computer spits out a text that is about a DIN A4 page long and takes three minutes to read. “You can now read the story to your child,” says Maiwald. “Or you press this button. Then the computer does it.” And after another three minutes of computing time, a warm male voice actually begins to speak: Lottie was a happy and curious five-year-old girl who loved to play and discover. She had a brilliant smile and gleaming teeth… But then. Ouch, caries monster, toothbrush, fireworks.
The AI is programmed in such a way that it formulates in child-friendly and youth-free language, says Digital boss Sprinkmeyer. There is also a kind of explanatory function that conveys any topic adapted to the respective age. The universe for five-year-olds, for example. Violence and other problematic content are excluded, as are protected brands such as Batman or Lillifee for copyright reasons. “But most children want the superheroes to bear their names anyway,” says Sprinkmeyer.
In the past few weeks, various Tonies employees, from the press officer to the programmer to the bosses, have tried out the story-creating AI with their own children. The results are amazing, says Sprinkmeyer. “The children created their own worlds,” he says. Fire brigade and police operations with the names of friends, for example. soccer teams in space. But also contemplative walks in the forest and good conversations with deer and fox.
In the coming weeks, the story AI will now be tested in real customer use. The practical test is taking place in Great Britain because the program currently used, which puts the computer-generated texts in spoken language on the cubes, only speaks English. After a trial period lasting several weeks, a decision will then be made as to whether and in what form the artificial intelligence will be rolled out to the general public, according to the digital boss.
The hearing box from the German company Tonies is sold in more than 100 countries
Source: pa/dpa/Daniel Karmann
For the Tonies company, the introduction of AI could open a new chapter in an already legendary success story. It was only ten years ago that Patric Fassbender and Marcus Stahl, two non-specialist fathers who became friends when picking up their children from daycare, developed the idea of a storytelling cube and founded a company.
Three years later, the first boxes and figurines came onto the market, distributed through bookstores and the Internet. Today, five million dice and 58 million game figures have been sold. The two founders turned over 258 million euros last year and want to grow by 37 percent this year. They employ 400 people and now also sell their boxes in other European countries and in the USA.
There are now boys and girls with a Toniebox in over 100 countries around the world. If the new technology proves its worth, the storytelling AI from Düsseldorf could one day chat children to sleep in all time zones.
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