Toys2Life with Conversational Tech

Kids have easily adopted virtual assistants in the home to power their entertainment experiences, navigate smart homes, and find information. Join Founder Isaac Davenport and Bird M in this informative and interactive demo of their conversational smart toy platform, Toys2Life, which allows kids to take action and create stories using their favorite toys, low-cost radios, and a laptop.

Presentation will be hosted live via Zoom, featuring an intro to the Toys2Life platform, demo and Q&A with the Toys2Life team.

ABOUT TOYS2LIFE (www.Toys2Life.net)

The Toys2Life system makes tactile imaginative play fun and educational, melding creative writing, voice acting, and technology. Dolls and action figures are given a voice to talk to one another using low cost radios and a laptop. The player controls who talks to whom and where the story goes next using radio proximity detection combined with artificial intelligence. Kids can write lines for their own character, and voice their own character to bring the toy of their choice to life by placing a radio pack on their favorite doll.

PRESENTER BIOS:

Isaac got his PhD in Electrical Engineering from CU Boulder in 1998 and has worked on dozens of product development programs, run small companies, and worked as a hardware, firmware, and software design engineer and technical management consultant for gigantic companies. He is the founder of Toys2Life, which brings toys and action figures to life using BLE radios and an AI dialog engine. Previously, he ran the engineering department at Sphero and Syncroness, where he worked on products in the medical device, aerospace, instrumentation, robotics, commercial and consumer areas.

Bird is a writer and educator from New York City who has written and voice acted for Toys2Life. Bird is currently a lecturer for the English Department at the University of Colorado: Boulder, and he also teaches the Graduate Record Exam and Law School Admissions Test for Kaplan, where he was selected in 2018 as the 1:1 Online Teacher of the Year. During the summer, he works with Native American youth, teaching creative writing, science fiction, and drama as part of the CU Upward Bound program. Bird has copy edited textbooks, published stories in a variety of literary journals, and performed in the Unseen Festival and Jaipur Literature Festival. Bird received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado: Boulder in 2015.