Teddy Bears With Microphones (opens in new tab)

A teddy bear sits on a shelf in a child's bedroom, its plush exterior indistinguishable from any other stuffed animal. But inside, a microphone listens. A processor thinks. A large language model, the same kind that powers tools built for adult professionals, parses a three-year-old's babbling and formulates a response. The bear talks back. This is not speculative fiction. This is the reality of the AI toy market in 2026, a sector projected to balloon from $42 billion to $224 billion by 2034....