Talking dolls have come a long way since 1959 when Mattel introduced its popular Chatty Cathy dolls that uttered phrases like "I love you!" and 1962 when the cute, pig-tailed doll Talky Tina in the television Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" scared the daylights out a poor father Erich when she said, "I'm going to murder you!" (eerily, the same actress, June Foray, was the voice of both Chatty Cathy and Talky Tina).
Now, Mattel--collaborating with the artificial intelligence company ToyTalk--has released its latest arrival, the talkative Hello Barbie dolls which, with the aid of voice-recognition software, 8000 lines of stored scripted lines spoken by an actress, and a Wi-Fi connection, can have a two-way dialogue between child and doll. And on a whole different front, American sex doll developers Douglas Hines of New Jersey-based True Companion (maker of Roxxxy Dolls) and Matt McMullen of RealDoll, headquartered in California, are planning to introduce a new breed of sex dolls that hold conversations with their users.
Though they are hugely different, the toy Barbies and sex doll have some surprising similarities. Both are being marketed as "friends." Mattel is advertising the Hello Barbie doll as being "just like a real friend" because she "listens and adopts to the user's likes and dislikes." By recording and archiving the children's conversations on ToyTalk's server, the doll can also remember and refer back to previous conversations--creating a sense of continuity and a personal connection.
The Roxxxy dolls on True Companion's website are also advertised as being "your loving friend. She can talk to you, listen to you, and even feel your touch" (and then there's that real selling point: the website says she can "even have orgasms." No matter that they are the simulated kind).
The Hello Barbies and sex dolls are also causing controversy. One big worry is that these facsimile females are becoming so humanoid, so realistic, that they will disrupt relationships between real human beings. Parents worry that when children confide in a talking dolls, they'll be less interested in conversing with real people. And women worry that sex dolls--the silent as well as the talking kind-- may supplant them. It doesn't help when men like provocateur- journalist Nikos Yiannopoulos in "Sexbots: Why Women Should Panic" writes, "When you introduce a low-cost alternative to women that comes without all the nagging, insecurity, and expense, frankly men are going to leap in headfirst." Fanning the flames, engineer David Levy in his book Love and Sex With Robots predicted that in the year 2050, Massachusetts would become the first state to legalize marriage to robots.
The worries about artificial females supplanting real females are so great that in England, there are even movements afoot to ban sex dolls like Roxxxy and make them illegal. Anthropologist and ethicist Kathleen Richardson of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK along with Erik Billing in Sweden have launched the ban campaign based on their concerns that the dolls will objectify women, reinforce typical female gender stereotypes, and disrupt the relationships between men and women and same-sex relationships as well.
Why else might the new Barbie dolls and sex dolls be a real cause for concern? For one thing, they represent a version of the age-old quest to use technology to create for The Perfect Woman. In the 2004 remake of the film, The Stepford Wives, Mike Wellington (played by Christopher Walken) shows the new arrivals Joanna and Walter how the career-women wives of Stepford, Connecticut are put into a "Female Improvement System Machine" and emerge as beautiful, sexy, adoring robot wives who love to cook and clean, women free of all "annoying habits" (in the original, scary 1975 film version, the wives were actually murdered). And in the recent British/American television series Humans, the robot Anita says she is superior to real humans because not only is she a great cook and helper but she also never gets anxious or depressed. She also has an added feature--- empathy---the holy grail of today's roboticists who are developing companions and caretakers for children and the elderly.
The new Roxxxy sex dolls, as advertised on the True Companion website, will have customized technology "to provide a perfect partner." They're a bit short of the Stepford wife model--they don't cook or clean--but as Hines says, they "do everything else." In an interview, Matt McMullen tried to be reassuring, saying "sex dolls could never replace a real woman," and Hines has said Roxxxy is not meant to replace a real person but instead to supplement relationships--or serve as a replacement for a deceased partner or fill a gap when people are between relationships. But he also suggests that the sex dolls are better than real women because of their willingness to do anything. The dolls, he noted, will readily respond to sexual requests, and " your wife or girlfriend may not react in the same way."
The Hello Barbies with their idealized adult female bodies and their perky pretty faces are also versions of the Perfect Woman. Dressed in their short metallic jackets with pink trim, the dolls are, says Mattel, both "trendy and techie" ---a way of telling young girls that they can be geeky and fashionistas too. In her book The Dream Doll, Barbie's creator Ruth Handler wrote that at first she "fretted that little girls would be intimidated by too much beauty" but that as the "designers made the doll prettier and prettier as the years went by," it "became clear that little girls were not intimidated by Barbie's looks." It's the dolls' perfect bodies, though, that worry parents who fret that their daughters may be haunted by this model of what their figures should be.
The conversations of the new Hello Barbies and sex dolls are also causing alarm. For the Barbies, some parents are up in arms over the privacy issue because ToyTalk will not only record but also store the children's remarks on its own servers--to facilitate research and improve the product's speech recognition capabilities, the manufacturers say. To ease parents' worries that the company has access to their children's words, Mattel had written in its online privacy statement that the company "is committed to safety and security" and the doll "conforms to applicable government standards, including the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act." It also says parents can delete whatever stored recorded conversations they like from the server at any time.
Meanwhile, as was widely reported, Bluebox Security and the independent researcher Andrew Hay discovered that the new Hello Barbie with its accompanying app had troubling security issues and vulnerabilities so that children's conversations could potentially be hacked, disrupting communication between the app and ToyTalk's cloud-based server. Many of the issues have since been resolved, yet Mattel's privacy statement now says in a carefully worded statement that if the Hello Barbie database were to be hacked, "we will evaluate and implement an appropriate response and plan, based on the nature of the incident and applicable legal requirements." Whether all these reassurances ease parents' anxieties remains to be seen.
Another big worry is about the impact of canned conversations--both the toy Barbie versions and the sex dolls too. Critics worry that Hello Barbie programmed responses will undermine children's ability to be imaginative. Instead of children using their imaginations to create a two-way conversation---speaking in their own voice and uttering the doll's words as well--with the Hello Barbie, the doll's response is shaped and controlled by Mattel. The Hello Barbie doll conversations seem designed to promote a comfortable emotional connection between child and doll, but ToyTalk writer and director Sarah Wulfeck made it clear, in a telephone interview, that the manufacturer is always in control: "Barbie leads the conversation," she noted, and "Barbie has an agenda no matter what." The conversations will tend to focus on the doll's core themes: Fashion, Family, School, and Friendship. Noted Wulfeck, children love to give advice, so the Barbies in their conversations sometimes convey vulnerability by telling their concerns about friends or family--allowing children the opportunity to give some empathetic suggestions.
Sex doll conversations are more tightly controlled. In movies like Cherry 2000, the sex dolls just say what the men want to hear, and in the 1975 and 2004 versions of The Stepford Wives, the robotic women are unerringly supportive and sexy in their talk. In Hines' video demonstrations, The True Companion Roxxxy sex dolls, through the use of speech -recognition software and voice-over artists who record the lines, have very basic, simple "conversations," often tailored to men's interests, including football and cars. If she's physically touched, the sex doll is gratifyingly responsive: "So exciting!" If the user asks Roxxxy "How was your day?" she answers politely, "My day was great. How was yours?" She engages in what Hines calls "general chit chat," including, "I would love to have you kiss me." (During the demonstration, though, there were some disconcerting clunk clunk electronic sounds between the doll's phrases, undercutting the illusion.)
In a Vanity Fair interview, Matt McMullen sounded ambivalent about endowing his RealDoll sex dolls with artificial intelligence and conversational abilities in a few years. He fretted that while today's realistic sex dolls promote men's love of fantasizing, sex dolls with scripted conversations might undercut the fun of fantasies. Talking sexbots, he said, "will take away from the reality of what real relationships are with the doll where it's mostly imagination. " He added, "You program the doll to agree with everything you say, do everything you say, always be nice to you and go along with what you want, it's boring."
One thing for sure---the conversations uttered by the Roxxxy dolls are largely limited to the personalities of women in sexual roles imagined by men--roles ranging from naïve to naughty, including Young Yoko ( age 18+ "naïve yet curious," Wild Wendy, Mature Martha (described as " matronly" and preferring to talk rather than interact physically), Frigid Farrah (very reserved) and S&M Susan.
The new Hello Barbies may also encourage young girls to imagine themselves in stereotyped female roles, like playing a TV reporter telling about Cinderella or being a fashion designer, creating, said Wulfeck, "the best shoes ever." Still, there is room for hope rather than worry as the Barbies present new role models. For several years Mattel has been producing nontraditional career Barbies (like Barbie Airplane Pilot, Barbie Astronaut," and even the Barbie-for-President dolls produced in 2012 and earlier. So here's the question: will there soon be a talking version of a 2016 Barbie-for-President doll? And what will she say?