Fuzzy cuddly chatbots for kids

Amanda Hess, They’re Stuffed Animals. They’re Also A.I. Chatbots. NYTimes, Aug, 15, 2025.

Curio is a company that describes itself as “a magical workshop where toys come to life.” When I recently visited its cheery headquarters in Redwood City, Calif., I found it located between a credit union and an air-conditioner repair service. I stepped inside to meet the company’s founders, Misha Sallee and Sam Eaton. And also Grem, a fuzzy cube styled like an anime alien.

Curio makes chatbots wrapped in stuffed animals. Each of its three smiling plushies has a back zipper pocket that hides a Wi-Fi-enabled voice box, linking the character to an artificial intelligence language model calibrated to converse with children as young as 3.

Eaton plunked Grem on a conference table and positioned it to face me. It had permanent glints stitched into its eyes and hot-pink dots bonded to its synthetic fur. “Hey, Grem,” Eaton said. “What are the spots on your face?”

A bright mechanical trill originated from Grem. “Oh, those are my special pink dots,” it said. “I get more as I grow older. They’re like little badges of fun and adventure. Do you have something special that grows with you?” [...]

Grem, and its pals Grok (an apple-cheeked rocket ship not to be confused with the chatbot developed by xAI) and Gabbo (a cuddly video game controller), all of which sell for $99, aren’t the only toys vying for a place in your child’s’ heart. They join a coterie of other chatbot-enabled objects now marketed to kids: So far I’ve found four styled like teddy bears, five like robots, one capybara, a purple dinosaur and an opalescent ghost. They’re called things like ChattyBear the A.I.-Smart Learning Plushie and Poe the A.I. Story Bear. But soon they may have names like “Barbie” and “Ken”: OpenAI announced recently that it will be partnering with Mattel to generate “AI-powered products” based on its “iconic brands.”

A mongoose in the playroom:

In my home, the morning hour in which my children, who are 2 and 4, sit in front of a TV-or-something is a precious time. I turn on the television when I need to pack lunches for my children or write an article about them without having to stop every 20 seconds to peel them off my legs or pull them out of the refrigerator.

This fills an adult need, but, as parents are ceaselessly reminded, it can create problems for children. Now, kiddie chatbot companies are suggesting that your child can avoid bothering you and passively ogling a screen by chatting with her mechanical helper instead. Which feels a bit like unleashing a mongoose into the playroom to kill all the snakes you put in there.

Hmmmm....Behind the bot:

These anthropomorphized gadgets tell children that the natural endpoint for their curiosity lies inside their phones. Now that these kinds of characters are entering children’s physical spaces, in the form of cuddly toys, the terrifying specter of “the screen” has been obscured, but playtime is still tethered to a technological leash. As children speak to their special toy, it back channels with the large language model — and with their grown-ups too.

Surveilling the kiddies:

Curio ensures that every conversation with its chatbots is transcribed and beamed to the guardian’s phone. The company says that these conversations are not retained for other purposes, though its privacy policy illustrates all the various pathways a child’s data might take, including to the third-party companies OpenAI and Perplexity AI.

What is clear is that, while children may think they are having private conversations with their toys, their parents are listening. And as adults intercept these communications, they can reshape them, too, informing the chatbot of a child’s dinosaur obsession or even recruiting it to urge the child to follow a disciplinary program at school.

Of course there is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995), as one of many fictional progenitors of such things. And then there's my own venture into this world The Freedoniad: A Tale of Epic Adventure in which Two BFFs Travel the Universe and End up in Dunkirk, New York.