A True Wind-Up Girl

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
August 25, 2005
A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and
Show Emotion
By MICHEL MARRIOTT

Judy Shackelford, who has been in the toy industry for
more than 40 years, has seen a lot of dolls. But none,
she says, like her latest creation, a marvel of
digital technologies, including speech-recognition and
memory chips, radio frequency tags and scanners, and
facial robotics. She and her team have christened it
Amazing Amanda.

"The toy industry is sort of like 'MacGyver,' " Ms.
Shackelford said, invoking the problem-solving 1980's
television hero. "You're always doing workarounds,
figuring out how to rearrange the old in some new way
to create something new. And you've got to do it for
nickels and dimes and quarters."

She then turned to the doll seated on her lap. "Hi,
honey," Ms. Shackelford said gently to Amazing Amanda,
a blond, blue-eyed figure bearing more than a remote
likeness to its creator.

"Hello, my name is Amanda," the doll replied as Ms.
Shackelford smiled warmly at its rosy face. "We're
going to have the best time together," the doll
promised.

Amazing Amanda, scheduled for release next month by
Playmates Toys, is expected to cost $99, said Ms.
Shackelford, the chief executive of J. Shackelford &
Associates, a product and marketing company in
Moorpark, Calif., that specializes in toys and
children's entertainment.

At that price, the same as Apple's entry-level iPod
Shuffle digital music player, the 18-inch-tall doll
promises - right on the box it will be sold in - to
"listen, speak and show emotion." Some analysts and
buyers who have seen Amanda say it represents an
evolutionary leap from earlier talking dolls like
Chatty Cathy of the 1960's, a doll that cycled through
a collection of recorded phrases when a child pulled a
cord in its back.

Radio frequency tags in Amanda's accessories -
including toy food, potty and clothing - wirelessly
inform the doll of what it is interacting with. For
instance, if the doll asks for a spoon of peas and it
is given its plastic cookie, it will gently admonish
its caregiver, telling her that a cookie is not peas.

While $99 is a premium price for a doll, it is only
about $10 more than the price of the popular American
Girl dolls. And, Ms. Shackelford said, Amanda may
prove that girls as well as boys can embrace
technology in their toys.

While video games and interactive robots, like Wow
Wee's Robosapien, have long been successful in
capturing the imaginations and buying power of
preteenage and adolescent boys, a different assumption
has been made about what girls want, analysts say.

Part of the popularity of low-tech dolls like Mattel's
Chatty Cathy and Barbie, and more recent additions
like Bratz (from MGA Entertainment) and the American
Girl dolls (a line acquired by Mattel), has been that
they allowed young girls to use their imagination,
said David Riley, a senior manager at the NPD Group, a
market research firm.

"I think girls have more active imaginations than boys
do when it comes to play," Mr. Riley noted. "If girls
have a button on their doll and can feel an engine
inside it, that takes away from their ability to
imagine."

He said that from what he knows of Amazing Amanda, Ms.
Shackelford and her company appear to have overcome
such problems, noting that Amanda appears to be more
doll than robot.

Mr. Riley added that the $20 billion toy industry has
faltered in recent years as children's tastes and
styles of play have changed. Toy spending has been
widely seen as migrating to consumer electronics.
Children are increasingly craving devices their
parents want, many analysts say, like cellphones,
digital cameras and portable digital music players.

One way to counter that trend, Ms. Shackelford said,
is a meaningful integration of advanced technologies
into traditional toys, like dolls. "You've got to get
out of the mind dodge," she said. "You have to push
the envelope."

Ms. Shackelford has been testing limits since she
joined Mattel in 1976 as manager of preschool
marketing. Three years later she became the
highest-ranking woman in the American toy industry
when she was named a Mattel vice president, the first
woman to reach that rank. Credited with reviving the
Barbie line of dolls and toys in the late 1970's, she
left Mattel in 1986 to establish her own company.

There, Ms. Shackelford created a series of doll lines,
including other Amazing dolls - Amy, Ally, Maddie,
Ashley and Baby - that all incorporated electronics so
they could virtually "know" things like when to wake
up, and a child's birthday and favorite holidays.

And now she is trying a new frontier with Amazing
Amanda, convinced that it will stoke a girl's
imagination, not take its place.

One prerelease model of Amazing Amanda, once it was
activated (by flipping the toy's only visible switch
hidden high on its back and beneath its clothing),
woke with a yawn, slowly opened its eyes and started
asking questions in a cutesy, almost cartoonlike
girl's voice.

What the doll is actually doing, Ms. Shackelford said,
is "voice printing" the primary user's voice pattern.
By asking a child to repeat "Amanda" several times,
the doll quickly comes to recognize and store in its
electronic memory that child's voice, and only that
child's voice, as its "mommy." Other voices are
greeted with Amanda's cautionary proclamation, "You
don't sound like Mommy."

In all, Ms. Shackelford said, the doll is equipped for
almost an hour of speech that includes various
questions, programmed responses, requests, songs and
games. And as Amanda speaks, the doll's soft-plastic
lips move and its face, using Disney-like
animatronics, help to suggest expressions.

For instance, when Amazing Amanda plays a game called
funny face, she asks if you would like to see a happy
face or a sad one. If you answer "funny face," the
doll's eyes brighten and she looks as if she is
smiling. If Amanda is asked to make a sad one, her
lower lip protrudes as her lids lower. She might even
ask if you would like to see her cry, responding to
"yes" or "no."

"The speech-recognition chip running in Amazing Amanda
acts not only as speech recognition, but also allows
her to talk," said Todd Mozer, chief executive of
Sensory, a speech-technology company in Santa Clara,
Calif., that developed the chip used in the doll. He
noted that the technology could interpret a range of
languages and dialects.

Sensory executives said that was vitally important to
Ms. Shackelford, whose new doll is one of the first
products to use the new speech chip.

Ms. Shackelford said the chip's multidialect
capacities are important for her doll, which is being
manufactured in China to be sold to English-speaking
markets around the world. The chip, explained Adam
Anderson, one of the lead project managers, carries
additional dialect references gleaned from children's
voices recorded in England, Ireland, Australia and New
Zealand.

And by asking children to repeat words like "pizza,"
the doll can lock in specific dialects, "remember" and
respond accordingly, Mr. Anderson said.

Some 150 pages of logic programmed into Amanda help
guide children through activities as if journeying
through verbal mazes, Ms. Shackelford said.

"The idea that a child can be led through play, that
it can be done intuitively, is so important to me,"
she said, adding that her doll's sophisticated
technologies must be invisible.

"We don't want to make kids scared of technology,"
said Ms. Shackelford, who says she is in her mid-60's
and has no children of her own. "You have a baby doll
that is supposed to make a little girl feel like the
doll loves her. Girls tell dolls all the time that
they love them.

"This doll," Ms. Shackelford said, "acts like she
loves you."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/technology/circuits/25doll.html

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