Boss Your Kid Around By Making A Toy Pig Talk

These mobile messaging devices are cleverly disguised as adorable toys (and they are as much fun for adults as they are for kids).

It's hardly a surprise that mobile devices increasingly play a role in how children learn to communicate. One recent survey found that 38% of kids under the age of two know how to use a tablet before they know how to utter a complete sentence. This predilection for technology might be inevitable, but that doesn't banish the concern that the more we become captivated by screens, the less we connect to our surroundings.

So when Gauri Nanda and Audry Hill designed a 21st-century-appropriate kids toy, they stuck to an important maxim: "We didn't want to create another toy that puts a kid in front of a screen," Nanda says. Instead, they built Toymail, a cartoonish line of animal-mailbox hybrids that function like a messaging service for kids. The Mailmen sync to an app via Wi-Fi, where parents (or grandparents, or aunts and uncles, and so on) may send voice messages to the little ones. When a message is received, the Mailmen will oink or grunt to alert its owner, who can chat back through a built-in microphone.

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