CogniToys Dino

» see cognitoys.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2014 IBM ran the Watson Mobile Developer Challenge, looking for someone to build a consumer product on top of the machine that had won Jeopardy. The grand prize went to three people from Majestyk Apps in New York, Donald Coolidge, JP Benini and Arthur Tu, who spun out a company called Elemental Path and announced that they were going to put Watson inside a talking dinosaur for children. It sounded like a joke at a hardware meetup. It was a real product eighteen months later.

The Kickstarter went up on 16 February 2015 asking for $50,000 and cleared it inside a day. It closed at roughly five and a half times the goal, about $275,000 from 2,278 backers, and those backers got their dinos in November 2015. The thing was a green plastic dinosaur about nine inches tall with a button on its belly. Hold the button and ask a question, and it went out over wifi to Watson and came back with an answer pitched at whatever age you had told it the child was.

What made it worth writing about was the tuning rather than the technology. Elemental Path had to teach an enterprise question-answering system to talk like a friend to a five-year-old, which mostly meant throwing away most of what Watson could say. Coolidge later put it plainly: Watson was built for enterprise businesses and pharma, not for kids. By late 2017 they had moved off Watson entirely and onto their own software, and shipped a build-it-yourself robot called the STEMosaur.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it got watson ~

The Watson deal is the part people misremember. IBM's contribution was a competition and then access to the platform; Elemental Path built the toy and paid for it. For a while it was the most visible consumer thing anybody was doing with Watson at all, and that cut both ways. It got a nine-person startup on stage at CES and in every "AI in the home" story of 2015, and it also meant a children's toy was carrying the marketing weight of a platform that was mostly being sold to hospitals.

~ 402 payment required ~

The company's death is not written down anywhere, so the archive has to do it. On 13 February 2019 cognitoys.com was still a working 34-kilobyte Shopify storefront selling dinosaurs. On 11 May 2019 the same URL answered HTTP 402 Payment Required with a page titled "Something went wrong", which is what a Shopify store serves once it has been frozen. On 28 July 2019 the domain was a GoDaddy parking page, and it has been parked or dark ever since.

The toys themselves outlasted the storefront by a while, because the API kept answering after the shop stopped selling. Owners were still posting in late 2020 that their dino had gone mute, which suggests either a slow shutdown or a subscription somebody forgot to cancel. Elemental Path's own domain, elementalpath.com, now serves a New York online casino affiliate page built on top of the abandoned Webflow project, with the original 2017 publish date still sitting in an HTML comment at the top.

~ what a dead dino sounds like ~

Pen Test Partners had already taken one apart under the title "Jurassic Poke", which is the closest thing the product has to a technical eulogy. Their finding was the ordinary one for the era: the interesting data was in the cloud, the device was a thin shell around a microphone, and the security question was really a question about a company's balance sheet. When the balance sheet went, the toy became a plastic dinosaur that lights up and says nothing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »