Talking Cabbage Patch Kids
A notable extension to the line was the "Talking Cabbage Patch Kid", equipped with a voice chip, touch sensors, and an infrared device for communicating with other such dolls. The touch sensors enabled the toy to detect when and how the toy was being played with in response to its vocalizations, e.g. the doll might say "hold my hand" and give an appropriate speech response when the touch sensor in the hand detected pressure. A more remarkable effect occurred when one doll detected the presence of another through its IR transmitter/receiver. The dolls were programmed to signal their "awareness" of each other with a short phrase, e.g. "I think there's someone else to play with here!", and then to initiate simple conversations between the dolls themselves with enough randomness to sound somewhat natural.
The product success was limited; some reasons offered at the time were the high price of the item ($100 or more), the need to have multiple dolls to take advantage of the full conversational effect, for some people the spookiness of having dolls converse with each other without human intervention, and the limited play value of a talking doll over its silent counterpart.
Read more about this topic: Cabbage Patch Kids
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