DoCoMo ports its Japanese voice assistant to a toy sheep
While Microsoft has made its voice-driven Cortana assistant available across Windows 10 devices, Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo is porting its own helper to a different kind of hardware—a toy sheep.
Developed with toy maker Tomy, the cartoonish plaything can have simple conversations in Japanese and connects via smartphones to DoCoMo’s cloud-based natural-language dialogue platform. It’s designed for family use.
The gadget is called OHaNAS, short for the awkward title Organized Human interface and Network Artificial intelligence System but also a play on the Japanese verb “hanasu,” to speak. The latest in Tomy’s long-running Omnibot toy series, it can talk about topics such as the weather, food or horoscopes, and engage in Q&A sessions with users aged 8 and up.
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