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CONCERN has been voiced over a new Barbie doll that can record children’s voices and upload them to the internet.
The ‘Hello Barbie’ doll, which will be sold by maker Mattell in the autumn, is interactive meaning children can have two-way conversations.
But the toy, likely to be the ‘must have’ present over the festive season, has been dubbed ‘creepy’ by charities after it was discovered that children’s voices would be uploaded to the internet via Wi-Fi to enable the function to work.
When the child speaks to the doll, the toy ‘listens’ to their words, sending them off to a computer system to give an appropriate response.
In a demo of the doll at a New York fashion fair, a saleswoman showed how the Barbie worked. In footage on YouTube Hello Barbie says: ‘I love New York, don’t you?’ She then asks: ‘Tell me, what’s your favourite part about the city?’ When the saleswoman responds by saying she likes Italian restaurants, Barbie says: ‘You have to take me to try it’.
Susan Linn, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, told reporters: “Kids using ‘Hello Barbie’ aren’t only talking to a doll, they are talking directly to a toy conglomerate whose only interest in them is financial.”
Other child welfare organisations said they were concerned that a child’s intimate conversations with her doll would be recorded and analysed.
In Mattel’s demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests and her family. This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children, opponents suggest and some are now calling for a ban on the doll.
The conversation capabilities of the Hello Barbie toy from Mattel are powered by a venture capital-backed San Francisco start-up called ToyTalk, which receives and interprets speech recorded by a microphone in the doll before initiating a pre-programmed vocal response. Crucially, the data is stored by ToyTalk for use beyond the immediate response but its creators say there is no cause for concern.
“ToyTalk and Mattel will only use the conversations recorded through Hello Barbie to operate and improve our products, to develop better speech recognition for children, and to improve the natural language processing of children’s speech,” a ToyTalk spokesperson said.
