When the artificial intelligence toys lose their clamor, a brutal selection battle over “relationships” has already begun

If judged solely by the volume of public opinion, the AI toy industry seems to be experiencing a post-winter cold spell in the past few months. Looking back a year ago, it was a completely different scene: at various trade shows, toys labeled with “AI” were everywhere; in startup cafes, discussions about “the next Tamagotchi” never ceased throughout the night; in the meeting rooms of investment institutions, the flipping of checkbooks was incessant, and the cries of “the next trend” echoed through the clouds.

However, at present, the clamor is receding. The spotlight of the media has moved away, the heated discussions on social media have decreased, and many teams that once announced their entry into the market with great fanfare are now plunged into an unsettling silence. Thus, a pessimistic trend has begun to spread: “Are AI toys no longer viable?” “Is this sector a false demand?” 

But if you truly take a deep dive and immerse yourself in this industry for a while, touching the cold supply chain and the warm user feedback, you will discover a more cold and real truth: This is not the end of the industry, but the beginning of a cruel “natural selection” that has just started.

I. Silence after the Noise: The Pre-requisite for Industry Maturity

Before most disruptive industries reach maturity, they all go through a painful period from “boiling over” to “cooling down”. During the lively times, the air is filled with concepts, stories, and boundless imagination. Capital is chasing possibilities, and entrepreneurs are selling visions. But when the tide recedes, what remains on the beach is only one thing worth examining: the product itself.

AI toys are at this crucial turning point. They no longer need more PPTs and press conferences to prove their existence; what they need is to prove their value on users’ desks and bedside tables. This silence is not the declaration of death, but a sign that the industry is beginning to “take products seriously”.

II. What Gets Eliminated Isn’t AI, But the “Wrong Product Perspective”

The explosive growth in the past year was essentially a “grafting experiment” driven by technology. The maturity of large models has made everyone see the hope of implementation, so the most straightforward path was quickly replicated: attach AI wings to traditional toys.

Voice recognition, large models, and voice synthesis form a nearly ready technical chain. Thus, countless “speakable toys” were produced in a conveyor belt-like manner within a short period. They can chat, tell jokes, recite Tang poems, but they soon exposed a fatal flaw: users would try them out out of curiosity, but they wouldn’t stay.

The reason is that these products merely achieved “functional superposition”, rather than “relationship construction”. They can respond, but they can’t participate; they can speak, but they have no soul. They are essentially just voice speakers disguised as toys, a “useable but unsustainable” consumable. When the novelty of the first users wears off, these products lacking emotional stickiness are the first to be eliminated.

III. Turning Point: From “Can We Do It” to “How Should We Do It”

When the industry returns from the noise to silence, the core of the problem also shifts. In the past, people asked: “Can we integrate AI into toys?” Now, the surviving players are beginning to seriously ask: “How should AI toys be designed?”

Behind this, there is a leap from “technology orientation” to “product orientation”. It forces practitioners to think about more complex and essential questions: What is the core usage scenario of this product? Why do users keep opening it instead of ChatGPT in their phones? How is the “relationship” between the machine and humans established through lines of code? How do memory, personality, and interaction form a self-consistent loop?

These questions have no standard answers and cannot be quickly solved by burning money. Only those teams that truly focus on conducting user research, refining interaction details, and constructing emotional logic can find their own “product model”. At this stage, the industry is moving from the blind “single-point experimentation” to the rational “systematic understanding”. And this understanding of the “correct path” is far more of a barrier than the technology itself.

IV. Leap in Silence: From Imagination to Product

While the outside world is lamenting the “cooling down”, some more solid signals are quietly growing within the industry. We observe that some excellent products are beginning to show a stable repeat purchase rate, not because of marketing, but because of word-of-mouth; some users are beginning to form fixed usage habits, chatting with AI dolls before going to bed has become a part of their lives; some teams are no longer enthusiastic about releasing new features, but are focusing on optimizing the tone of a reply or the delay of an action.

All of this points to a key leap: AI toys are moving from the “imagination stage” to the “product stage”. Once this hurdle is crossed, the industry’s rhythm will completely change. The sound becomes quieter because the shouting matches have ended; but the progress becomes faster because everyone is concentrating on improving their internal skills. The true players are starting to enter, and the gap between them is being rapidly widened in this silence.

V. Revaluation of Value: From “Function” to “Relationship”

Many people still wrongly understand AI toys from the “function” dimension: being able to talk, being able to tell stories, being able to interact. But this is only the surface. To understand their true value, we need to examine it in the broader context of the family AI ecosystem.

Just like the AI home appliance system being promoted by giants like Hisense, it addresses the issue of “efficiency” – making the temperature more precise, the air fresher, and household chores easier. AI appliances are tools that make life smoother. While AI toys address another dimension of “relationships” – companionship, emotions, connection, and memory. It is not optimizing life, but entering it. It is not a cold assistant, but a warm carrier of relationships. Once we recognize this, we will find that the ceiling of this field is much higher than any ordinary hardware category.

VI. The Logic of Explosion: Not More Products, But an “Established” Model

Many people still mistakenly believe that the explosion of the industry means the emergence of thousands of new products. But for AI toys, the true explosion point will be the birth of an “established product model”.

This model must have several characteristics: it has a continuous reason for use, no longer relying on short-term novelty; it has a memory system, allowing relationships to deepen over time; it has a distinct personality setting, rather than randomly generated dialogues; it is bound to scenarios, deeply embedded in users’ daily lives.

Once such a product emerges, users will no longer merely “use” it, but start to “depend” on it. At that time, the attributes of this field will undergo a qualitative change – it is no longer just a hardware business, but closer to a social relationship, content carrier, and emotional infrastructure hybrid.

VII. The Silent Call: Channel Undercurrents

In the technology industry, silence often indicates that the real competition has just begun. Because the concept has been verified, the bubble has been squeezed out, and what remains is a hard-hitting ability competition. These competitions often occur in unknown corners, on production lines, in code lines, and in the recordings of user interviews.

If you shift your gaze away from the noisy “public opinion field” and towards the real “market front”, you will see a completely different picture: channels have begun to move.

Some astute offline channel managers are reselecting the categories of AI toys, removing those pseudo-products with only gimmicks; some agents who were originally holding a wait-and-see attitude are starting to actively contact those teams that have accumulated technology over time; Even some channels that failed in their trials last year are now summarizing their experiences and preparing for a second layout; even more so, some large channel distributors are already reserving prime shelf space for new products.

These actions will not make headlines in tech media or go viral on social media. But they share a common feature: they all occur in “places closer to the transaction”. In the consumer goods industry, channel distributors are the most pragmatic group, they don’t care about stories or concepts, they only care about “can it be sold”. Their collective actions are essentially voting with real money.

Thus, we see a highly ironic yet extremely real dislocation: on one hand, there is quietness on the content side, while on the other hand, there is a simmering undercurrent in the channel side. This might be the most genuine state of this industry: the surface cools down, but the bottom heats up. And history has proved countless times that the real explosion often occurs during this “surface cold, bottom hot” stage.

VIII. Conclusion: Survivor Bias

The explosion of AI toys is likely not to happen during the most bustling period, but when most people have stopped discussing it. That’s why, at this stage, the most crucial issue is no longer “whether to enter”, but “whether you have adopted the right method”.

Because once the “established product model” is verified, the user’s mind will be quickly occupied, and usage habits will be quickly locked. At that time, the opportunity window for later entrants will be extremely narrow. For those still confused practitioners, the only way out now is to stop chasing concepts and return to the deep construction of user relationships. After all, in this war about “self-projection”, only those products that truly understand human hearts can wait for the dawn to come.