HANGZHOU, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Since the very moment toys were first brought to life by human hands, their purpose has been to wrap us in comfort, spark delight and touch the heart. Now, AI is enabling toys to engage in more natural interactions with people while delivering even warmer companionship, resulting in speeding up competition and transformation in this time-honored sector.
Amid fierce competition among manufacturers and sellers in China, the AI toy is emerging as a new competitive track in this industry, with a surge of interactive, personable and memory-enabled AI toys flooding into brick-and-mortar stores and onto e-commerce platforms.
Today, parents and children in China can easily find an array of AI toys, such as plush companions that soothe and comfort, building-block robots that blend coding basics with hands-on creativity and voice-enabled storytellers that craft personalized tales and immersive games, among others.
"China's toy industry is entering a brand-new stage of intelligent development. In particular, the deep integration of AI technology with the traditional toy industry is accelerating the reshaping of product forms and value chain structures, with AI toys becoming a new engine driving high-quality development of this industry," said He Yaqiong, an official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
This perspective has been echoed by data from a report released by the China Commercial Industry Research Institute, which predicts that China's AI toy market will grow to 85 billion yuan (about 12.5 billion U.S. dollars) by 2030.
ADDING EMOTIONAL VALUE TO BRIDGE AGE GAPS
Even for archaeologists, it is difficult to determine when humans first began making and playing with toys. However, one thing is certain: modern consumers are increasingly seeking toys that provide greater emotional value, thus comforting and delighting themselves and others. AI, notably, is bridging such consumer demand via modern technological advancement.
From the perspective of industry players, the boom in AI toys is serving to better satisfy consumers with a deeper, unprecedented joy through interaction, emotional soothing, a sense of growth and more. Compared with traditional toys, AI toys are evolving from single-function entertainment products into "smart companions" that integrate educational enlightenment with interactive companionship.
The AI-toy-specialized company Haivivi, based in Shenzhen in south China's Guangdong Province, launched its Coco-Mate series of AI toys in collaboration with the classic IP Ultraman by placing AI-powered devices inside the toys.
Once activated, these toys can "comprehend" users' emotions, needs and even thoughts via voice dialogue, and then provide people with companionship and empathy in the tone and manner of Ultraman.
"From previous voice story-telling devices to AI toys today, the fundamental shift to today's AI toys is in product logic," said Zhong Wenjie, Haivivi's director of public relations.
Currently, AI toys are upgrading from "performing some functions" to "offering people companionship." No longer in a role of one-way content provider, AI toys now can respond to children's wildest ideas, spark their creativity through dialogue, and can even help parents gain deeper insights into their children, according to Zhong.
This integration of emotional value and practical value has expanded the users of AI toys from children to "all age groups." A fine example here are the popular AI memory assistants. They can remind seniors to take their medicine on time, schedule visits to doctors and play favorite old songs, while offering emotional companionship across generations.
SMARTER TECH, SAFER PLAY
In the view of industry insiders, the base of China's boosting of innovation and the market trend in terms of AI toys, is the country's smart AI-powered technologies, including large language models and visual large models, which enable toy products to "hear," "see" and "think."
In fact, modern AI toys have gradually transcended the role of traditional toys, with some of them capable of bridging the age gap by providing more delightful and thoughtful companionship for people of all ages. Via accessing large AI assistant models or specialized companionship models, some AI toys can achieve high-precision emotion perception and personified feedback, coupled with long-term memories.
Zhong, meanwhile, believes that looking ahead, AI toy interaction cannot simply rely on general-purpose large models. To make them more intelligent playmates and interactive partners to people, toy developers must tailor deep customization and specialized optimization for specific scenarios via exclusive intelligent interaction solutions.
Safety concerns regarding booming AI toys and related niche products have, meanwhile, drawn the attention of both the government and the public.
China in April 2026 issued new rules regulating providers of AI systems that simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns and communication styles in continuous emotional interactions with users, placing strict safeguards on content for minors.
These interim measures, jointly released by the Cyberspace Administration of China along with four other government departments, aim to balance technological innovation with safety and public interest. The rules will take effect on July 15, 2026.
The framework comes as human-like AI interaction tools expand rapidly in China, with applications emerging in cultural communication, childcare and elderly companionship.
According to Zheng Qinghua, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the rules precisely focus on the unique risks of personified interactive services, by establishing an identity reminder mechanism, building an addiction prevention and psychological protection system, and strengthening data security and privacy protection,
"These rules clarify the positioning of AI personified interactive services as assisting and serving humanity, delineate ethical red lines, prohibit the substitution or distortion of AI as real social relationships and interpersonal interactions, as well as strictly guard against cognitive confusion and emotional alienation that may arise from blurred human-machine boundaries," Zheng said.
Emphasizing a "development with security" approach, the rules combine encouragement of innovation with tiered supervision, thus aiming to guide the sector toward "healthy and responsible" growth.
Given this policy guarantee and market demand, it is anticipated that China's AI toy sector will constantly unleash the vitality of niche technologies and emerging scenarios, creating a new competition track and reshaping the toy industry pattern, allowing toys to become better companions for humans in this era. ■
