As someone who covers toys for a living, one thing people ask me about over and over is the rise of AI-enabled toys. Are they as cool as they claim to be? Do they live up to the hype?
My answer, for the most part, has been no, not yet. As we mentioned last year, AI-enabled toys tend to be buggy and glitchy—and expensive. Most importantly, in our home tests, kids didn’t seem to like playing with them.
Until now: The Stickerbox is the first toy that puts AI front and center that did well in Good Housekeeping Institute toy tests. The premise is simple: Kids can push a button and describe a picture they want to see made into a sticker, then the AI draws it for them in black and white and prints it out. Then, kids can color it in and decorate their notebooks and laptops to their hearts’ content.
What Stickerbox does well
The best thing about the Stickerbox is what it doesn’t try to do: It’s not an AI chatbot, or a storytelling robot, or anything that tries to have a seamless back-and-forth conversation with kids. For the most part, in our tests, these toys still struggle to understand kids, some have privacy issues and concerns, and often kids find them uncanny and creepy. By not trying to be a “friend” to kids, Stickerbox avoids these pitfalls.
When we tried it out, Stickerbox did a pretty good job of understanding the kinds of pictures the kids were describing and coming up with an image to match. For the most part, testers who were in elementary school or older had an easy time explaining what they wanted and getting it made. Testers even tried describing stickers in a few different languages, and it still gleaned their meaning.
And the testers liked doing it, too! “She loved being able to use her imagination to come up with silly pictures that she received instantly,” one parent told the Good Housekeeping Institute. “She came up with some really silly stickers that she was then able to color with the provided colored pencils.”
An AI toy is only as good as its limitations, though, and Stickerbox pulled through here as well. It wouldn’t let sticker-makers use licensed characters in its images, so there’s no worry that Bluey and Barbie will start popping up on homemade stickers doing unspeakable acts. (“Try again,” the box says if you ask it to do something it can’t.) And the company likes to boast that it’s COPPA certified, which means it’s not storing or selling data about their users.
Where Stickerbox falls short
Hapiko says the sweet spot for this toy is kids ages 5 and up, and our testing seems to agree. When we looked through the feedback for this toy, testers who were 3 and 4 years old had a harder time using it. “At 3 years old, my daughter had a difficult time using the voice feature,” one parent explained. “She wasn't able to consistently remember to hold the button down while speaking, so it was frustrating for her to get it to work. Even when she did, the box didn't always understand what she was saying.” And, faced with an infinite number of possible stickers to create, sometimes the younger ones just drew a blank. For those who want to use this with a preschooler, know that an adult probably has to guide them through it.
Then there’s the fact that the stickers all have a certain aesthetic. They have an ugly-cute, AI-meets-street-art style, no matter what is described. Kids find them pleasing, but I caught up recently with a dad in my neighborhood who is a professional illustrator. His daughter attended a birthday party where the Stickerbox was the main activity, and his artistic sensibilities were offended by what the kids were making.
And, finally, there’s the fact that Stickerbox comes with that higher, AI price tag. However, you get a lot for the money, including three rolls of BPA-free thermal paper, eight colored pencils—and all of those privacy and content filters. There are cheaper imitators on the market, but while they claim to put privacy first, they don’t have that same COPPA certification, and we haven’t tested the limits of what they’ll allow to be printed. So, for now at least, we’re sticking with Stickerbox!
