In 2015, the toy company, Mattel, partnered with ToyTalk, a technology company that specialized in conversational AI, to release a special edition Barbie doll called, Hello Barbie.

Hello Barbie was WIFI enabled “smart toy” that incorporated speech recognition and artificial intelligence to engage in interactive conversations with children. Hello Barbie listened to what children said and responded accordingly, providing, what the companies called, “personalized interactions and storytelling experiences by using speech recognition and natural language processing.”

Basically, Hello Barbie was a doll that looked like an ordinary Barbie, except it was connected to the internet and a user could talk to it and it would talk back, remembering things the user had said, details to keep the conversation going, etc and so forth.

Overall, the experience wasn’t bad and you could kind of see where ToyTalk was going when it comes to embedding AI into dolls.

Today, it feels like there is a kind of Hello Barbie 2.0 in the conversational AIs that are popping up everywhere. Large Language Models that sound so human, even with their imperfections. AI models that feel like a person can talk with them in ways that could only be imagined back in the Hello Barbie 1.0 days of the late 20-teens. And, unlike the Hello Barbie doll that was limited to talking about food, fashion, and family, the conversational AIs of today might be able to take on some of the thornier questions and discussions that someone could never have when the language models were in their infancy.

Joining today’s show is Pi, which bills itself as a digital assistant designed to “help you with all sorts of things!” (which is a direct quote from Pi). “Whether you need a friend to talk to, a guide to help you navigate the world, or just someone to share a laugh with,” it says, “I'm here for you.”

Pi was created by a company called Inflection AI, based in Palo Alto, California and their stated mission is to redefine human-machine interaction.

Pi is being used for today’s episode and conversation is because it seems to have a much better “personality” with how it “talks” to a user, especially when compared to the Sky voice of ChatGPT’s conversational AI (featured in Episode 1 of The Secret Life of Tech). The voice sounds a lot like Aubrey Plaza and it even has her sass and sense of humor. In fact, Pi is willing to take on the personality or characteristics of many celebrities and it does a great Aubrey Plaza, even just natively and without being asked to speak in her style or manner.

It's the perfect voice for Hello Barbie 2.0 and we hope you agree.

Barbie Music Mix by Revive Music: https://youtu.be/CgjXWZcVGug?si=PWP19pYSxhwYzvnT

Johnny Cash sings "Barbie Girl" (A.I.) by Justin Ullmann: https://youtu.be/HW1qjsqS1zM?si=moPTu189JZ0uCC1R