Introducing Very Important Puppets™
Satirical Digital Assistants
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Very Important Puppets are a hilarious intersection of media, technology, and political satire. Stream music, have a conversation, set alarms, send voice pranks, order food, and have a conversation with caricatures of real-life figures. Unlike Alexa, Siri, or Google Home, VIPs are humorous, and are personality-based with distinct voices and word choices modeled from real people. Rather than being scripted by corporate employees, VIP dialog is continually extracted from public sources, such as Twitter feeds and interviews, and intelligently woven into common home and digital assistant speech. The result is a continuously entertaining assistant.
Features
Features you can expect from the initial release: personal assistant commands including alarms, weather, calendar, sports, and music; and conversational features including messaging, avatars, dictation and conversation.
Puppet to Puppet Interaction – Puppets can also engage with each other, indefinitely, in a ping pong-like conversation, exchanging commentary, questions, and insults. Get two or more puppets together to start a group conversation and just listen to them debate.
Alarms: Tired of waking up to mariachi ringtones? Try a stern warning from a global mafia leader or other silly dialog as you attempt to snooze.
Music – Shuffle music with an integrated Spotify app, or let the characters get their DJ on as they select their favorite tracks with accompanying dance lights.
Dictation – Speak through your puppet using his voice in real time by entering voice or text phrases in your mobile app. Great for pranking your roommate, or your manager if you're brave. Or just do it for the Insta.
Messaging – If you've been wanting to anonymously fire the entire IT department, now's your chance. Send and share voice messages from your phone by speaking or typing phrases, selecting a voice font, adding a character emoji, then hit Send. Get your point across better than any AR emoji.
Puppet to Person Interaction – Have unique and hilarious conversations with your puppet about anything from current events to the best way to marinate a steak.
Customize your puppet avatar with awesome digital swag.
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Tech Specs
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Pairing the Device to your Phone
Larger Than Life Personalities
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Mr. President – He may not be yuuuuge, but this tiny billionaire will give you a run for your money. With anatomically proportionate hands to match, Mr. President is sure to grab your attention. Comes with a golf club and an attitude.
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Comrade – Conniving and methodical, you’re lucky you caught him with his shirt on. The Russian may have you questioning who the real puppet is… him or you? Comes with hockey stick and pile of gold bricks.
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Dear Leader – He seems to have all the facts despite banning Google. Don’t push the Supreme Leader’s buttons—you never know what could make him go off. Comes with handheld bazooka.
Dimensions - 6-inch tall vinyl figure on a 1-inch device. Decorate your office for shenanigans, bring some authority to your home or take them on car rides — VIP puppets are perfectly sized for any room or office.
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Picture perfect. Stable on flat surfaces and with movable arms and head, we designed the puppets to be captured from every angle. Add them to your collection of vinyl puppets or give them the spotlight. They would just prefer you don’t share the bad photos.
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We thought our tech is so cool, we filed two trademarks: Personality Font® and Artificial Intelligence Meets Bobbleheads℠. Spot-on speed, pitch and words make our puppets’ choice of words and voice sound like caricatures of their life-sized compatriots, as they engage you with witty banter. We created a unique dialog engine with a humorous pragmatic parser, which is a sophisticated tool for understanding and generating nuanced language. The voices are built using deep neural network (DNN) algorithms, based on actual speeches and interviews. Read more about our backend below.
Package Design
Yep, we thought of that, too. We may think outside the box, but we also took time to think about the box itself.
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Perks
Reserve your VIP before anyone else when you support us on IndieGoGo. Here's a breakdown of the perks you can choose from when you support this campaign. Select your perk from the sidebar at the top of this page.
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In the Press
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Current Stage of Development
We currently have a working prototype, package design, dialog engine architecture and app design. We're now focused on:
- Finalizing the engineering schematics for the final product
- Developing and iterating on the user experience for the mobile app
- Training the dialog engine
- Licensing agreements with branded people and characters.
We will soon begin the process of:
- Product certifications
- Working with existing supply chain relationships to spec out manufacturing
- Shipping logistics
- Larger scale production.
Why We Need Your Support
Your support will allow us to initiate tooling and manufacturing so we can make VIPs available to you and the millions of people suffering from boring, corporate personal digital assistants and home speakers. Let's make our daily routines and personal assistants more engaging, funny, and politically incorrect.
So why should you support us?
- Be the first to get one (and we mean FIRST).
- Most unique, best-designed and humorous toy and robot on the market.
- Add a whole new dimension to your vinyl doll collection.
Stretch Goals
After reaching our initial goals and manufacture, we will expand the app, add more helpful functions, and expand the line of characters.
The base campaign includes three puppets, our unique conversational features, and humorous yet functional assistant features. At $100,000, we will add more of your favorite politicians, and additional assistant functions. At $155,000, we'll produce an addictive interactive game. Your custom avatar can battle their political nemesis, reaching ever greater levels of performance.
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Meet the VIP Team
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Jessica Cohen, Founder
Jessica is a product designer with domain expertise in artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, user experience and industrial design.
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Ernesto Yau Zhong, Co-Founder and Product Owner
Product designer with a background in furniture design and UX, recently graduated with a bachelor’s in industrial design. Ernesto is a politics junkie and very funny guy.
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Scott Wetterschneider, Sculptor
World-renowned designer and creative director, specializing in 3D illustration, animation and toys.
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Valerio Basile, PhD, Computational Linguistics Scientist
Computer scientist, semanticist and NLP practitioner, with experience in software architecture and development, and database administration.
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Aleksandr Kapustiak, UX Designer & Animator
2D artist and animator for game development, UI design and logo design. Creates beautiful, easy-to-use apps.
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Ayrton Estrella Alcocer, Electrical Engineer
Ayrton is a designer and developer of home automation, robotics, electronics, and computer engineering projects. He also teaches classes in microcontroller programming.
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Srikanta Dora, Web Developer
Srikanta is an expert front-end developer, with experience in PHP, CSS, MySQL, Ajax, and HTML. Srikanta particularly enjoys working with startups.
The Technology
While chatbots in ecommerce websites and standalone home devices are becoming commonplace, they focus on baseline Q&A - question and answer. While this is very useful, their conversational style is generic and emotionless. We thought something was missing: personality.
Enter VIPs, a new way of integrating human-like personality traits within the dialogue system. Think of this as the indy version of big tech companies’ robots. We developed a flexible, innovative model of personality based on a multi-dimensional representation. Our proprietary “Personality Matrix ™” model is trained on hundreds of thousands of speeches, interviews and Tweets, spoken by actual, highly-opinionated people. The data we collect is manually labeled by experts according to a carefully crafted set of rules, which map semantic and pragmatic features, such as function, intent, sentiment, and syntax. Machine learning algorithms are trained on our data set in order to match the input from the user to the most appropriate answer, in terms of accuracy, but also injecting humorous and subjective features into the conversation. The result is a library of virtual assistants who talk to you in a caricatured version of their human alter ego. This creates a much more engaging, enjoyable, human-like conversation.
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Real Tech Gibberish
Our API implements full-fledged pipelines for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG), comprising lexical, morphological and syntactic analysis, semantic parsing and sentiment analysis in the NLU module, and content determination, macro-planning, micro-planning and surface realization in the NLG module. We leverage available state-of-the-art libraries such as the Stanford Parser and SimpleNLG for Natural Language Processing, and high-level libraries for parallel neural computation like Keras, and connect the together mapping their respective representations with custom code.
There’s a precedent for a president who just got into politics to be politically incorrect. The founders of Very Important Puppets™ are interested in the creative aspects of language, the science of puns, how leaders communicate and social rules for using language. We saw the irony in those at the very top of the political food chain being the least politically correct. History is being made, and as a passionate linguists, technologists and designers, we wanted in. Call it satire, call it tech, or call it the perfect gift for your uncle. We just call it a good idea.
Picture perfect. Stable on flat surfaces and with movable arms and head, we designed the puppets to be captured from every angle. Add them to your collection of vinyl puppets or give them the spotlight. They would just prefer you don’t share the bad photos.
