CogniToys has conversations with kids.
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Elemental’s smart connected toy CogniToys taps IBM’s Watson supercomputer for its brains

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Elemental Path has something hot on its hands with CogniToys, the smart connected toy that uses the artificial intelligence of IBM’s Watson supercomputer to hold conversations with children.

The educational toy startup blew through its Kickstarter crowdfunding goal of $50,000, raising more than $165,703 from 1,400 backers in its first seven days of a 30-day campaign. CogniToys is a toy that listens to a child and taps the Watson supercomputer, which became famous for playing Jeopardy against human players. Watson handles speech recognition and A.I. responses to questions that the children ask.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.