Sensory Chip Boosts FURBY’s Powers

Oct. 6, 2005
An all-new FURBY creature has been engineered with Sensory Inc.'s RSC-4128 microcontroller. The new FURBY, a product of Hasbro Inc.'s Tiger Electronics division, is larger and uses six times more memory than its predecessor. One of the best selling

An all-new FURBY creature has been engineered with Sensory Inc.'s RSC-4128 microcontroller. The new FURBY, a product of Hasbro Inc.'s Tiger Electronics division, is larger and uses six times more memory than its predecessor. One of the best selling toys of all time with more than 40 million units sold, FURBY has complex motor controls for dancing, expressive eyes and moving ears; multiple sensors for tilt, tickling, petting and feeding; and advanced multilingual speech and listening capabilities. All of its functions are located on a single RSC-4128 chip, which keeps the cost of a new FURBY under approximately $40 at retail.

In addition to the chip, the evolved FURBY creature employs a technology designed by Hasbro called EMOTO-TRONICS. This lets FURBY display many new personality characteristics that make it more lifelike. According to Leif Askeland, Vice President of Engineering and Technology Development for Hasbro, "We have been able to make the new FURBY with many of the features that we had wanted to put in the original but could not because of cost. Thanks to Sensory's cutting-edge ICs and speech technologies, the new FURBY creature can actually listen to what you say and respond in a very vibrant fashion."

New speech capabilities were developed using Sensory's Quick Text to Speaker Independent (Quick T2SI) recognition technology, which allows vocabularies in multiple languages to be built for an RSC-4128-enabled product. It uses text models that can be fine-tuned for a particular dialect, and the command words are speaker independent, which means FURBY understands any speaker and even recognizes different accents, According to Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory, "The new Sensory-energized FURBY creatures promise to set a new standard for realistic, low-cost interactive toys around the globe."

Company: SENSORY INC.

Product URL: Click here for more information

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