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We bring toys to life with speech and a personality, allowing them to interactively engage and grow with a child. Read more

New York, NY Technology
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$243,338
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We bring toys to life with speech and a personality, allowing them to interactively engage and grow with a child.

New York, NY Technology
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About this project

$243,338

pledged of $50,000 goal

In the News!

Introducing CogniToys:

Recognizing a clear gap in truly smart educational toys, we set out on a journey to redefine the way kids play with their favorite toys. We've built a patent pending technology that allows kids to directly engage in intelligent conversation with their toys. The technology allows toys to listen, speak and simultaneously evolve, learn and grow with your child; bringing a new element of personalized, educational play to children. 

With your help, we are launching Elemental Path's first product: CogniToys – a cute cuddly dinosaur that is fun, playful and smart. 

CogniToys Features:

Speech Enabled - By pressing the belly of the toy, the child can speak directly to it, allowing the child to:

  • Ask thousands of questions and receive age-appropriate answers
  • Give commands to the toy allowing the child to discover hidden talents
  • Hear a number of stories and even create their own stories
  • Tell and listen to knock knock jokes
  • Create a unique personality for the toy that evolves over time based on the child's interaction with the toy

Internet Connected - Our toys are Internet "connected" smart toys, allowing for us to constantly improve the play experience. 

Personalized - Each toy will get to know the child and grow with him/her, interacting directly with them to create an experience around each child's personal interests. The toy will explore favorite colors, favorite toys, interests and use these to customize engagement. Even better, the toy has a personality of its own that changes over time. 

Educational -  Here's the best part: CogniToys create an atmosphere of fun, playful education! Built into the play experience is a number of custom modules that engage the child in educational play. These include rhyming, spelling, vocabulary, mathematics and much more. As the interaction increases so will the challenge of the educational content continuing to become more challenging as the child learns. 

This is where the tech becomes important. To a child, the experience should be seamless and fun, truly giving their toy a personality that actually engages them in a playful way. 

The technology required to accomplish this is very complex. We have created the first truly "connected" toy that is able to reach out to our cloud platform and give back an age appropriate, personalized response to each utterance. We have developed an extremely robust platform that allows this to happen and will continue to evolve long after the first rewards are shipped. As more children use the platform the toy will continue to evolve and the better the experience will become. As we proceed, we will identify even better sources of content and continue to create updates that are fun and educational. 

Why Kickstarter?

Because the Journey is half the fun.

It begin nearly a year ago when we entered the IBM Watson Mobile App Developer Challenge with a unique concept: a toy that could learn and grow with a child. Winners of the challenge would receive access to IBM Watson — IBM's powerful cognitive computer - which is one of the elements necessary to create a truly transformational toy. 

Accepting the Grand Prize Award at the IBM Watson Mobile Developer's Challenge
Accepting the Grand Prize Award at the IBM Watson Mobile Developer's Challenge

Out of hundreds of companies we were honored with the title of Grand Prize Winners in The Challenge. Immediately following we began refining our concept and moving it towards an actual product. We held initial focus groups surrounding an app based "friendgine" that was able to have early conversations and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We began to create our close network of supporters who volunteered their time, and often their children's time, to ask questions and test our early prototypes. 

We relied on family to be early test subjects in our product design process. They were more than happy to play the part!
We relied on family to be early test subjects in our product design process. They were more than happy to play the part!

We quickly moved into the "product" design phase while simultaneously continuing to build out our platform, a process which has proven to be tons of fun! Rapidly producing 3D print prototypes to let family interact and play with gave us valuable insight into our product design choices. Some designs were good, others bad, but the iterative process was crucial in honing down a final product that kids would love. We ultimately chose a dinosaur for our final design.

Our 3D printer allowed us to iterate multiple product designs rapidly.
Our 3D printer allowed us to iterate multiple product designs rapidly.

We have been hard at work over the last year making the best product possible. We have conducted numerous kid based focus groups, parent focus groups and have finalized a working prototype. 

Now it's time to move into production and again find those awesome supporters that help these types of products come to life. That's why we chose Kickstarter. Because this is just the beginning and we need your support to help us bring CogiToys to market. 

Rewards

View the rewards list on the right for full Reward details!
View the rewards list on the right for full Reward details!

Stretch Goals:

UPDATE: With the support of the Kickstarter community we have reached and surpassed our stretch goal of $100,000! This milestone will allow us to create our CogniToys Dino in alternate colors. We will reveal the two new color options shortly. We will also be launching additional stretch goals based on all of the amazing feedback we have received thus far. 

Kids love colors and kids love choices! The feedback on our green dino has been great but we would love to offer kids additional choices. If we reach $100,000 we will make two new colors available to choose from:

Risks and challenges

We are focused on delivering all pledges in a timely manner, however, as with any product that involves complex manufacturing, production delays could become an issue. We will focus on keeping our supporters always informed and mitigating any potential delays.

We have an extremely experienced team that has delivered on both physical and digital products, large and small. This experience will help us identify potential issues we face early and apply the appropriate recourse. Thank you for your patience and we hope you love the product as much as we do!

Learn about accountability on Kickstarter

FAQ

  • The toy works best for children 4-7. Older children can still interact and play with the toy.

    Last updated:
  • The first product will support English. We hope to add support for additional languages in the future.

    Last updated:

Rewards