Oren Jacob, former chief technology officer at PIXAR has created iconic movie animation such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo using technology. But not until 2011, when his daughter tapped his ideas for something that he has never done before.

Jacob and his daughter, Toby, had just finished a Skype call. They’d been chatting with some other family members on Jacob’s smartphone, and it was still sitting on the table in front of them, when the 7-year-old Toby picked it up and asked if she could call her American Girl doll. Jacob paused before answering. “No, you can’t,” he said. “But let me get back to you on that.”

It was this inspiration that Jacob and his team launched a new company called ToyTalk, a San francisco based firm that develops mobile game apps that allows kids make a conversation with their favourite cartoon characters. The goal of Toytalk is to create apps in which children can converse with animated characters the same way with SIRI Software (Apple’s App).

That seems normal to other applications available out there to some tech companies that has been creating speech recognition softwares for many years. But with Toytalk’s software, it targets children’s tone of voice, intonations, pitch and cadence.

Monitoring the children’s response will also assist the company in updating the apps based on what they learned from the kids conversations with the characters and which animations they prefer the most.

Jacob’s immediate goal is to convince children have the conversations with these characters easily and entertaining. He also forecasted that these could help teaching developmental skills like language and reading comprehension.