Mattel Aristotle

~ the goodbye ~

Aristotle is an odd thing to bury, because nobody ever owned one. Mattel showed it at CES in January 2017 and killed it on 4 October of the same year, and everything in between was a stage demo and a very long argument about what a live microphone in a nursery is actually for.

The hardware came out of Nabi, the kids' tablet business Mattel had bought out of Fuhu's bankruptcy a year earlier. What it announced was a $299 bundle: a speaker with a light ring for the crib side, and a separate Wi-Fi camera pointed at the crib itself. Microsoft supplied the assistant layer and the machine learning, Qualcomm the silicon underneath.

The pitch was longevity. Aristotle would soothe a crying baby with a lullaby and a dimmed light at one end of childhood, and quiz a seven year old on spelling at the other, learning the kid the entire way. Somewhere in the middle it would notice you were running low on diapers and order more.

That last feature is the one that tells you what the device was. A voice assistant that grows up alongside a person who is too young to agree to any of it, keeping the record on somebody else's servers, and knowing enough about the household to do the shopping.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what $299 was supposed to buy ~

Jim Mitchell, who ran Nabi inside Mattel, described an ecosystem rather than a speaker: a hub in the bedroom talking to the camera above the crib, and to a set of connected toys and lamps around it. Parents got an app. The child got a voice that answered questions and handed out rewards for saying please.

It was supposed to ship in June 2017 and did not. By the summer the launch had slid toward the end of the year, which is the window where the campaign against it found room to work.

~ the letter from washington ~

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Story of Stuff Project ran a petition that gathered more than fifteen thousand signatures asking Mattel to abandon the product. A separate letter from pediatricians and academics made the developmental argument rather than the data one: young children should not be encouraged to form bonds and friendships with a data-collecting device.

Then it stopped being a campaigner problem. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Joe Barton of Texas, a Democrat and a Republican who had worked together on children's privacy before, wrote to Mattel asking exactly what Aristotle would collect from a child and who would be able to reach it afterward. Mattel had no good answer available in October 2017, because almost nobody did.

~ the day it died ~

Sven Gerjets had been Mattel's chief technology officer since July. He reviewed the product and concluded that it did not fully align with the company's new technology strategy, which is corporate for the campaigners were going to win this one. Mattel announced the cancellation on 4 October 2017, though the wire coverage is split across the 4th and the 5th depending on when each outlet got the statement.

The context matters more than the device. February 2017 had already seen Germany's telecoms regulator order parents to destroy the My Friend Cayla doll as an illegal surveillance device, and the CloudPets breach put two million children's voice recordings on an open database the same month. Aristotle walked into that year carrying a camera and a microphone, and the toy industry's tolerance for the argument had run out before the product was finished.

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