Plush, Playful, and Powered by AI: How China’s Toys are Evolving
Toys once came to life through imagination. Today, they respond, adapt, and even think for themselves, thanks to more easily customizable AI applications like DeepSeek
What if your favorite toy could talk back, tell you stories or even help with your studies?
Thanks to AI, this is no longer science fiction. It’s a shelf-ready reality. While AI-powered toys are gaining traction across the world, in China they’re fast becoming mainstream.
And these aren’t just toys for entertainment, they’re personalized learning companions, emotional support devices, and interactive storytellers, adapting to a person’s preferences and behavior. Some even have a “babysitting” mode that takes snapshots of kids and sends them to their parents.
A key accelerator of this trend is DeepSeek, a large language model (LLM) developed in China. Its launch this year completely changed the game, unlocking powerful generative capabilities at low cost due to its open-source and more customizable design.
This provides developers with greater flexibility to modify the model for specific applications, thereby allowing even small toy manufacturers to build smart, conversational companions without expensive cloud infrastructure.
DeepSeek’s accessibility has sparked a wave of fast, modular innovation across the sector, enabling AI-powered toys to scale rapidly while compressing development cycles and cost barriers.
What’s On Offer?
Today’s offerings include plush companions that tell customized bedtime stories, modular voice boxes that can be embedded into existing toys, and emotionally intelligent robots that respond to a child’s or an adult’s mood. These toys aren’t just reactive, they’re adaptive, connected, and increasingly intelligent.
One example is Xiaodu, Baidu’s AI-powered smart speaker, which doubles as an educational assistant for children, supporting language learning, storytelling, and interactive quizzes. Meanwhile, AI-driven robotic pets developed by companies like UBTECH are designed to mimic real animal behavior, offering emotional support and a sense of companionship, particularly in urban households where space and time are limited.
The Market at a Glance
📊 Research and Markets predicts that the global AI toy market size will grow to over $35.11 billion by 2030, with Asia accounting for the biggest slice of the pie.
💹 In China, assuming that the domestic AI toy penetration rate reaches 20-25% by 2028, the AI toy market size is expected to reach 30 billion yuan to 40 billion yuan (US$4.2 billion to $5.6 billion).
What’s Driving the Trend?
The rise of AI toys in China isn’t just a tech story, it’s a convergence of cultural shifts, commercial forces, and the unmet needs of Chinese households.
Demand for screen-free, personalized learning
With growing awareness of the developmental downsides of excessive screen exposure, many parents are now turning to AI toys that offer interactive and educational engagement without straining the eyes. These next-generation toys are designed to personalize learning experiences, help kids develop language skills, problem-solving abilities, and emotional intelligence.
Smart help for busy parents
Increasingly, parents are drawn to toys that integrate seamlessly into the home’s smart ecosystem - connecting with voice assistants, syncing across devices, and offering features like remote monitoring or parental controls.
This preference is especially pronounced in modern Chinese households, where dual-income parents often balance long working hours with limited time at home. In many single-child families, AI toys are stepping in to entertain and provide light supervision, filling emotional and practical gaps in a typical weekday routine.
As one parent in Shenzhen put it:
“He (her son) usually asks all kinds of outlandish questions that I can't answer, but luckily we bought an AI companion robot to chat with him."
Emotional infrastructure in demand
A Tencent Research Institute report quoted by Xinhua revealed that only 4.6% of Chinese respondents feel their emotional needs are fully met through human relationships, with the majority facing various social dilemmas. Nearly half hesitate to share negative feelings for fear of affecting others. This makes AI companions especially appealing, providing children and adults with safe, always-available outlets.
Who’s Making Them?
A lot of the momentum in this sector in China is coming from startups – small, fast-moving companies that are combining open-source AI models with simple hardware to bring smart, responsive toys to market quickly. Here’s a look at some of them.
1) FoloToy:
“At the end of 2022, I encountered ChatGPT for the first time, and it was like a light bulb went off. It was so intelligent, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It really proved that ‘a pivotal moment in technology development has arrived.’ That day, I mapped out ten startup ideas in my head.”
Larry Wang, founder and CEO of FoloToy
That lightbulb moment set Larry Wang and his co-founder Guo Xinghua on the path to creating FoloToy. As fathers themselves, the duo shared a personal interest in building AI-powered companions that could offer more than amusement. They wanted toys that could educate, comfort, and grow with the child.
FoloToy began developing AI-integrated toys in 2023, shortly after the launch of ChatGPT sparked global interest in generative AI. In 2024, the company started gaining traction, shipping over 20,000 units through e-commerce platforms like Tmall and Amazon.
But the real inflection point came in early 2025, when Chinese open-source model DeepSeek went viral, triggering a nationwide AI wave. FoloToy rode that momentum and has now set an ambitious goal of 300,000 units shipped globally by the end of 2025, with products supporting more than ten languages and dialects and reaching over a dozen countries.
Their signature product, the Alilo Honey Bunny, is powered by an in-house AI chipset capable of holding full conversations, differentiating it from many existing conversational toys that can only answer to certain commands.
FoloToy is not limited to children's toys alone. In partnership with Chinese art toy maker Yomiplanet, it launched a limited-edition AI-enabled figure named Frank Murphy, capable of chatting in six languages including English, Chinese, and Japanese. Priced at 5,500 yuan (US$770), the toy blends novelty, interaction, and premium design.
FoloToy’s focus on hardware, rather than purely software, puts it among a string of start-ups betting on AI to give themselves an edge over traditional manufacturers.
2) Haivivi
Haivivi has struck a chord with Chinese parents through its flagship product: BubblePal. Designed as an external AI module, this small, pendant-style device that can turn their kid’s favorite toy into a smart companion. Depending on the configuration and platform you use to order from, the cost of each BubblePal ranges from around $59 to $149, with Chinese sites offering much better deals.
It tells personalized, emotionally rich stories, chats with kids, and lets children co-create tales — blending imagination with interaction.
According to founder Gao Feng, Haivivi’s growth has skyrocketed since early 2025.
"In 2024, the average monthly sales were only a few thousand units. By January this year, monthly sales had exceeded 20,000 units. According to data from the live broadcast platform Douyin, the daily transaction volume for Haivivi's toy livestream exceeds 500,000 yuan, with the number of transactions exceeding 1,000 units."
More than just a toy, BubblePal reflects a broader shift: modular, AI-powered devices that plug into a beloved soft toy and upgrade them into responsive, learning-ready companions. This relatively low-cost, high-impact model is especially well-suited to China’s value-driven but tech-savvy parenting culture.
3) Ropet
With its warm touch, expressive eyes, and mood-aware reactions, Ropet is reimagining what a robot companion can be. If your childhood (or even adult) dream was to have a soft, cuddly, emotionally available robot pet, then Ropet might just be the one for you.
Ropet is a Hong Kong-based startup that’s found its niche at the intersection of emotional AI and physical comfort. Unlike many AI products aimed at education or amusement, Ropet is a pet robot designed first and foremost for emotional companionship.
Unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2025 in Las Vegas, Ropet drew global attention for its mix of affective intelligence and tactile realism. It responds to voice, touch, and emotional tone using embedded sensors and microphones. Its body heats gently to mimic the warmth of a living creature, while its expressive LED eyes reflect a wide range of moods including joy, curiosity, sleepiness, and of course sulking.
Interestingly, according to KrASIA, more than 70% of its Kickstarter backers are believed to be adult women, many of whom were drawn to its comforting presence. This reflects a growing market gap: most companion robots have, until now, been child-focused or designed with male-centric features. Ropet’s approach is to target this underserved audience by emphasizing subtle, quiet interactions over flashy movements or constant chatter.
In China and across Asia, where single-person households and digital fatigue are on the rise, Ropet taps into a deeper emotional need: low-maintenance, high-availability companionship.
What’s Standing in their Way?
As AI toys become more deeply embedded in children’s and their parents’ lives, data privacy has become a front-line concern.
Many products collect voice data, emotional cues, and even images, raising questions about how that information is stored, used, and protected.
FoloToy founder Larry Wang talked about in his interview, where he noted that when operating in markets like the U.S., “the data generated during usage by American families is stored on our overseas company’s servers,” and that FoloToy invests heavily to “strictly comply with local regulations and ensure data security to the highest standards.”
Beyond data, the toys themselves are still learning. Current AI technology, while powerful, struggles with sustaining natural, emotionally coherent conversations, sometimes resulting in clunky interactions that fall short of expectations. This is improving rapidly, particularly with open-source models like DeepSeek, but there's still a gap between what’s marketed and what a product can truly deliver. Some providers estimate return rates for some AI plush toys priced around 400–500 yuan is likely to exceed 30%.
On the technical front, most AI toys depend heavily on third-party providers to handle the speech recognition and voice synthesis, which are then linked to large language models for conversation. This setup leaves toy makers with limited control over the end-to-end experience.
At the same time, the line between machine and friend is becoming blurrier. As toys mimic human-like conversations and remember past interactions, they raise important developmental questions: How do children interpret this “intelligence”? What happens when the toy becomes a trusted emotional outlet or breaks that trust due to a glitch or AI hallucinations?
What the West is Doing?
While AI toys in Asia thrive on open models and fast iteration, the Western market is shaped by a very different set of players and priorities. Key names include Miko, a robot designed to support learning and emotional development and Curio’s plush toy line, co-created by musician Grimes which offers screen-free companionship powered by generative AI. Other brands, like ROYBI, Tonies, and legacy players like LeapFrog, are weaving AI into their educational toys. But these exist within highly controlled, privacy-first ecosystems.
Then there was Moxie, an emotional robot by California startup Embodied, designed to help children build empathy and social skills.
But in late 2024, the company abruptly shut down and parents were left trying to explain to their children why their robot friend was “dying”. The moment stirred debate about emotional reliance on AI and what happens when those connections disappear.
In a 2025 Senate testimony, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he wouldn’t want his own child’s best friend to be an AI bot, underscoring broader concerns around emotional dependency and unregulated interaction.
What Comes Next?
But the truth is, AI toys are already online, on shelves, in homes, and slowly entering our daily lives. From Asia’s bold experimentation to the West’s safety-first approach, these products are redefining play, learning, and even early emotional experiences.
But would you want AI to be your or your child’s best friend and emotional support system?
We don’t know the answer just yet. Because while these toys are getting smarter, more responsive, and emotionally aware, what they offer is more than intelligence, they offer a personal connection.
Whether this enhances our lives or quietly replaces parts of it, is something we will all have to watch out for very closely.
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