WELCOME TO THE AGE OF CHATTING WITH YOUR TEDDY BEAR.

Elemental Path and ToyTalk hope to pioneer interactive toys. But will kids and parents want Internet-connected Barbies and dinosaurs?

Sitting in his company's small Midtown Manhattan office, JP Benini speaks casually into his smartphone. "Hello!"
Suddenly, a fluorescent-green plastic dinosaur sitting on the table in front of him springs to life. "Hi JP, what's up?" it says in a gravelly cartoonish voice.

"You sound like Cookie Monster," Benini says.

"What's wrong with that?" the dinosaur quips. "Cookies are delicious."

That dinosaur looks simple, but there are years of work and millions of dollars in research spending behind its responses. The prototype was created by Elemental Path, which Benini co-founded a year ago, and which uses IBM's Watson cognitive-computing platform -- famous for its appearance on "Jeopardy!" in 2011 -- to power its question-and-answer dialogue. Benini's company plans to start selling the Internet-connected dinosaurs, his company's first product, under its CogniToys brand in November for $100 each.

Benini's hope is that the dinosaur helps pioneer a new kind of educational and entertainment toy for children that can answer thousands of questions, teach math lessons, learn from interactions with its owner and grow along with a child.

"The whole talking-toy arena didn't exist a year ago," Benini says. "You had things like your Teddy Ruxpins from way back when, you had Speak & Spells from even further back, but it was never really interactive. They were never listening to your child -- they were more or less yelling at them."