Creepy smart toys patented by Google

The Tech-giant, Google, has filed a patent for toys that pay attention to the people who are in the room and can interact with other media devices. Though this patent is clearly weird, bordering on creepy, but it can also be viewed as a security measure. The product is futuristic and quite promising even though such smart toys maybe a long time in coming.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has shared some diagrams that show a rabbit and bear toys with microphones in their ears for monitoring voice patters, cameras in the eyes to view and record the goings on in the room, speakers in the mouth to interact and motors in the neck which would help them to rotate their necks and provide a 360 degree view of the surroundings. These devices would be able to listen, hear, communicate, make eye-contact and even respond to others with pre-recorded phrases. The idea seems quite interesting but designing such smart toys would be a huge task indeed.

Communication in these devices or toys will be made possible through WiFi, Bluetooth and cloud-based computing. These toys can be used to keep a watch over the small kids or any other thing in the house. They can also be used to control or manage other media devices, like turning on songs or any other device on the commands of children. This is a really cool feature as the children will also be able to control these devices and have fun without touching them and harming the devices or themselves.

The patent did suggest that these devices could be used as a means to control the house media and entertainment devices more effectively. A remote control like this would make things simpler as the user will have to give out specific commands and the function will happen automatically. In the patent statement the term used or such devices is “anthropomorphic”, which means an equivalent of human’s presence. The patent was filed back in 2012 but was published recently.

As helpful as it might be, a lot of people are concerned about privacy and find the idea of having such a device as creepy. Many people are debating whether they would want something like this in their house that watches everything and says nothing.  The company decided to go with innocent looking toy shaped devices because they appeal to people of all ages.

Google is quite serious about the project and stresses that this would be a good step towards the way we interact with technology today. Google told the BBC, “Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.” However, the lead scientist, Richard DeVaul and fellow engineer Daniel Aminzade were unavailable for comment and it remains to be seen when this plan gets enacted.

Image source: http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20150138333&SectionNum=1&IDKey=1EF5AB92E988