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Author: Huang Nan

Editor: Yuan Silai

When you were a child, did you ever imagine yourself living in the world of Toy Story?

Around him are the loyal and brave Woody, Buzz Lightyear who wants to save the earth, the enthusiastic and cheerful Jessie, the funny and cute Egghead couple... As the closest playmates in childhood, they have witnessed many important moments and are loyal listeners. The only regret is that it cannot speak, so the interaction can only remain in a single thread.

Today, large models solve this shortcoming.

Hard Krypton recently came into contact with "Yue Ran Innovation" (English name: Haivivi). The company launched its first AI hardware product BubblePal, which provides plush toys with the ability to interact and communicate with children based on AI native and self-developed emotion models.

BubblePal is shaped like a semicircular bubble and is made of edible silicone. With just a light press, the device embedded in the bubble will light up, receive the user's input, and generate relevant answers based on the conversation.

"Leaping into Innovation" The first AI hardware product - BubblePal

In the past year, the industry's exploration of AI native applications and large-scale model landing products can be generally divided into two categories: one is for To B customers, which improves work efficiency and reduces costs by participating in production links and simplifying work processes; the other is for To C scenarios, such as writing articles, text graphics, game copywriting, and film and television script generation.

Among them, B-side customers have low tolerance for AI-generated content, but extremely high requirements for accuracy and efficiency. In actual application, AI native applications have not yet brought about a significant leap. In contrast, the C-side market represented by the entertainment industry and pan-entertainment scenarios has greater opportunities.

As an AI companion product that integrates software and hardware, BubblePal, a "Leap Innovation", focuses on the children's entertainment track and focuses on providing emotional value. It stands out among the many domestic B-side AI native applications.

At present, Yueran Innovation has completed three rounds of financing totaling tens of millions of yuan, with investors including BlueRun Capital, and funds under Gao Bingqiang and Li Zexiang. This is also the project with the largest personal investment by Professor Gao Bingqiang so far.

Multiple role playing

BubblePal proposes to use AIGC to respond to every whim of children. In terms of product form, BubblePal integrates software and hardware. The hardware appearance is "innovative" and uses "magic bubbles" with childlike innocence. When the plush toy wears bubbles, it is endowed with the ability to think and talk, and can conduct two-way interaction.

BubblePal product image

Different children like different toy characters. In the background of the APP, users can create different characters, such as Elsa and Olaf from "Frozen", Woody and Buzz Lightyear from "Toy Story", Ryder, Archie and Shaggy from "Paw Patrol" and so on; according to the differences in the characters created by users, the answers generated by BubblePal also have the attributes of different characters.

During the interaction, parents can first select a role and add personalized preferences, such as wanting to guide their children to learn, ask more questions, practice English, etc. During subsequent chats, BubblePal will consciously output relevant content in the conversation.

Haivivi Pal APP chat page

Gao Feng, co-founder and COO of "Yue Ran Innovation", showed Hard Krypton a case in an interview: let Teddy cultivate children's courage and issue storytelling instructions. Teddy will actively generate a story about adventure in the forest and output more encouraging language to cultivate children's self-confidence.

Of course, AI hardware that only has generation capabilities cannot meet the high emotional needs of children. In order to make the product smarter and more suitable for children's companionship scenarios, in terms of technology route, "Yueran Innovation" adopts a two-layer model idea of ​​large model + small model.

"Yueran Innovation" is connected to the mainstream large model products on the market, and the large model provides generation and logical reasoning capabilities. Since each model has different strengths, BubblePal can flexibly distribute and call the upper-level large model, such as using Zhipu for storytelling and Doubao for playing games. Not only can you create stories with your children, but also based on the long text dialogue capabilities of the large model, the "common memories" of toys and children can be preserved to achieve continuous companionship and common growth.

The small model provides emotional value. The "Yueran Innovation" team fed the model a large amount of children's books, fairy tales, cartoons and other materials in the early stage, which can understand children's cognition and expression. At the same time, after training, this emotional model can better identify the emotional fluctuations of children in the interactive state, whether they are happy, depressed, or angry, etc. By putting the emotional model in front, when the large model generates content, the small model will process it and output answers that are in line with the current situation.

More importantly, AI hardware products face the problem of response delay. When interacting, the big model can directly generate text, but for BubblePal to answer, the text needs to be converted into speech.

Therefore, the emotional model will perform segmented processing during voice conversion based on the answer from the large model to avoid intermittent answers that affect the user experience.

Hard Krypton learned that in order to increase the fun feedback of different scenarios, "Yue Ran Innovation" conducted a lot of market research in advance, and further trained and optimized the model around common role-playing games for children, such as teachers and students, doctors and patients, chefs and customers, and forest adventures.

At the end of this month, BubblePal will be available on domestic e-commerce platforms for 499 yuan; at the same time, "Yueran Innovation" will be sold overseas through independent sites, Amazon and other platforms.

AI Friends companion communication

With the support of large models, children's toy tracks are entering people's lives in a brand new form.

The two founders of "Yueran Innovation", Li Yong and Gao Feng, previously worked for Smartisan Technology, Tmall Genie and iQiyi. Li Yong was a partner of Tmall Genie. Both have rich product experience in the Internet and smart hardware fields.

In 2020, Li Yong discovered that children spent much more time interacting with Tmall Genie than adults. At that time, the sales volume of Tmall Genie was about 30 million units. From this point of view, if a product dedicated to children's AI interaction can be provided, its market space should not be underestimated.

Four years after this idea was conceived, it was finally realized at Leap Innovation.

Human conversations can be divided into three categories: upward perspective conversations, parallel perspective conversations, and downward perspective conversations. That is, when we are talking to someone we admire, our tone is often from an upward perspective; when we are talking to friends and revealing our hearts, we use a parallel perspective; when we are talking to service providers and tools, we use a downward perspective.

For example, in the past, smart speakers and reading machines represented by Tmall Genie and Xiaodu, the interaction between people and machines remained at the task stage. Through dialogue, they understood the instructions issued by people to help humans complete a certain task within a limited range, such as playing a playlist, turning on a sweeping robot, etc. This type of dialogue belongs to the downward perspective dialogue.

"It has no ability to have continuous conversations, sustained interactions and emotional companionship with children. It does not understand what emotions are, and has no way to imitate the objects that children like to generate behaviors, so what it executes are called 'commands'. Go forward means go forward, and turn on the light means turn on the light," said Gao Feng.

In contrast, AI-native children's toys can eliminate tool attributes and focus on emotional companionship itself. The technical path of combining large models with small models enables them to have the ability to capture, understand and feedback emotions. As AI Friends characters, they can communicate with people in a more humanized and parallel way.

For example, when telling stories, children's wild imaginations often raise some ridiculous questions, such as "Why do apples grow on trees but not in water?", "Do cats really have nine lives?", "Is there an octopus with ten legs?", etc. Smart speakers cannot answer such questions, but based on the big model, BubblePal can deeply participate in the creation of stories and build an imaginative world with children.

AI generates story dialogue

Gao Feng told Hard Krypton that there are several advantages to entering the field of AI hardware from the children's toy track. On the one hand, AI-generated content is open and creative, but it is affected by the illusion of large models, resulting in problems such as low controllability and lack of explainability. It is very consistent with the interactive education scene of children who pursue fun and stimulate imagination, and the application has inherent advantages.

On the other hand, China has strong supply chain advantages in the hardware manufacturing field, represented by "Yue Ran Innovation". The company has currently cooperated with several leading manufacturers, and the production cycle can be completed in about 30 days.

In addition, compared with large vertical directions such as finance, law, and education, children's toys target refined tracks in vertical categories, which are often not the areas that leading companies focus on and excel in. For start-ups, there are more opportunities to quickly occupy the high ground from the trend.

Gao Feng revealed that after short-term testing of BubblePal, the maximum usage time of users can reach 6 hours/day, and the average daily usage time is about 2 hours.

In the future, Yueran Innovation will consider open-sourcing its AI model algorithm capabilities to provide basic platform capabilities for other children's toy manufacturers and jointly build a smart toy ecosystem in the AGI era.