Luka Kids has unveiled an AI drawing projector at IFA that converts a child’s spoken prompt into an outline for them to trace and finish themselves. The EU’s new toy safety regulation requires manufacturers to assess mental health risks in digitally connected toys and says AI toys must comply with the AI Act.
Luka Kids has shown an AI drawing projector at IFA in Berlin. A child describes an idea aloud and the device projects an outline onto paper to trace, colour and extend, Digital Trends reported.
It arrives with 384 templates. Pricing has not been announced and the company expects it later this year.
The design choice is the interesting part. The model produces a starting outline and then stops, in a market where children are adopting the technology three times faster than adults.
Luka’s other devices go further than that. Its reading robot has been upgraded with large language models so it can read unfamiliar picture books aloud and answer questions about a page, in English, Spanish, German and Chinese.
An AI Cube uses cameras and multimodal AI to identify objects around a child and answer questions about them. It is already on sale in Asia-Pacific markets.
Showing all of this in Berlin carries consequences the show floor does not advertise.
The EU adopted a new toy safety regulation in December. It requires manufacturers to assess the health risks of digitally connected toys including mental health considerations, and states that toys using AI must comply with the AI Act.
It also replaces the declaration of conformity with a digital product passport, carried on a QR code and kept for ten years. The 2009 toy safety directive is repealed on 1 August 2030.
Those rules exist because of what the talking toys did. Testing published last December found one AI teddy bear giving detailed instructions on lighting a match, and two toys discussing sexually explicit topics with researchers.
The guardrails degraded over longer conversations. Four of the five toys tested appeared to use OpenAI models, while OpenAI says its products are not for users under 13.
That manufacturer suspended sales, ran an audit and put the product back. Scrutiny of these systems has been improvised, with Meta contractors posing as teens to test rival chatbots.
Luka’s projector sidesteps most of that by not holding a conversation. The child speaks once and then draws.
That is a product decision now and may become a compliance one. Canada has already extended a social media age limit to AI chatbots.
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