Hasbro's New FURBY Uses Sensory's Chip

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Hasbro, Inc.'s Tiger Electronics division has developed an all-new FURBY creature that has been engineered with Sensory's RSC-4128 microcontroller providing the brains for its many new functions.

The new FURBY is larger and uses six times more memory than its predecessor, allowing for motor controls (dancing, expressive eyes and moving ears), multiple sensors (tilt, tickling, petting and feeding), and multilingual speech capabilities (talking and hearing).

Using a technology designed by Hasbro called EMOTO-TRONICS, the evolved FURBY creature displays new personality characteristics. "Because of advances in technology, we have been able to make the new FURBY with many of the features that we had wanted to put in the original but could not because of cost," said Leif Askeland, vice president of engineering and technology development for Hasbro. "Thanks to Sensory's cutting-edge ICs and speech technologies, the new FURBY creature can actually listen to what you say and respond in a very vibrant fashion."

The new FURBY creature "understands" requests to sing a favorite song, tell jokes, dance and play interactive games. It can also communicate with children and other FURBY creatures using human languages, as well as its native "Furbish," making it a multilingual product.

The new FURBY creatures' speech capabilities were developed using Sensory's Quick Text to Speaker Independent™ (Quick T2SI) recognition technology, which allows vocabularies in multiple languages to be built for an RSC-4128-enabled product using text models that can be fine-tuned for a particular dialect, including invented ones like "Furbish." The command words are speaker independent. Hasbro's new FURBY creature is currently available in the US. and will be rolling out across the globe throughout the early fall.  In addition to English, versions will be available that also speak Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Italian.