After The Fracas Over Hello Barbie, ToyTalk Responds To Its Critics

CEO Oren Jacob has a few things he'd like to clear up.

At New York's Toy Fair, the toy industry's big February trade show, visitors to Mattel's booth were greeted, literally, by Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi–connected doll that uses speech-recognition technology to have real conversations with kids. The prototype was programmed with a few lines of dialogue specific to visiting New York and the Toy Fair, well short of the hours of conversation she'll be prepared to engage in when she's released officially later this year. Still, she performed so well that some visitors asked if there was a woman with a microphone hiding behind a curtain, and an unplanned "interview" with CNBC's Morgan Brennan went off without a hitch. "She went six or seven questions deep," says former Pixar CTO Oren Jacob, now cofounder and CEO of ToyTalk, the company behind the doll's conversation technology. "And she crushed it."

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