Should you give a child a talking Internet-connected toy for the holidays?

Just in time for the holidays, Geoffrey A. Fowler, writing in the Wall Street Journal, wonders whether we should worry about talking Internet-connected toys like Hello Barbie, which, he said, are “…a lot like Apple’s Siri trapped inside the body of a doll.” Hello Barbie records a child’s voice and sends it to the cloud for analysis, triggering a prerecorded response.

Fowler likens Hello Barbie to a voice-activated Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book that could hinder a child’s imagination. Whatever a child says, Hello Barbie—not a very good listener—pretty much sticks to her script. (That’s not unlike a lot of people.) Less scripted, he writes, is Dino, which leverages IBM Watson to answer questions like how far away is the moon with age-appropriate responses.

Fowler notes that unlike Siri, the talking toys try to feign friendship. Hello Barbie, for example, expressed sympathy over the death of a child’s pet fish. That prompted this response from MIT Professor Sherry Turkle: “Why are we letting this doll pretend it knows about dying? It doesn’t.”

Professor Cynthia Breazeal, director of the MIT Media Lab’s personal robots group, has somewhat of a different take. At the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston last May she described “social robots” that can assist in education and ease the anxiety of hospitalized children. Even adults can bond with robots, she said, citing as an example the robotic experimental life-coach Autom. Breazeal has founded a company to build Jibo, which she described as the world’s first family robot.

Fowler quotes Breazeal as saying, “We are not at a point where these things are dangerous and you must avoid them. We are at a point where there are great opportunities.”

Fowler also comments on the security issues surrounding Internet-connected toys, and he traces the history of talking toys back to Chatty Cathy in 1959 and Speak & Spell in 1978. Read his complete story here.

And by the way, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood has given its 2015 TOADY (for Toys Oppressive And Destructive to Young children) award to Hello Barbie.