What a parent can set on a Playnitive plush
The toy has no screen and no menu of its own, so every decision is made in the parent app: when it may be played with, how it talks, how loud and how bright it is, who else can see it, and when it goes to sleep.
- Where it livesThe free parent app
- Who can change itAny parent on the toy
- When it appliesFrom the next answer
One app, one toy, no hidden settings
Everything on this page is in the app you install once during setup, and nothing on this page costs extra. The plush itself has one button and one light: it is deliberately not a device a child can reconfigure.
- Open the app, tap the plush on the Devices list, and you are in its device menu. That menu is the starting point for every setting below.
- A change you save reaches a plush that is switched on within seconds, so you rarely have to wait for the next answer, and never have to restart anything.
- The play window and the subscription are enforced on our server rather than on the toy, so they hold even when your phone is off or out of the house.
Decide when the toy may be used
You can give the plush a play window for each day of the week, and outside that window a press of its button will not start a conversation. Both the master switch and the daily windows sit under Profile settings in the app.
Device menu, then Profile settings, then Play permission
- Play enabled is the master switch. Switch it off and the plush will not start a new conversation at all: its light turns purple to show why.
- Daily time limit adds a start and an end time to each weekday: 16:00 to 19:30 on school days and 09:00 to 20:30 at the weekend is a typical pattern.
- Any day can be left switched off, and then the plush stays quiet for the whole of it.
- The check runs on our server, once for every question, against the clock in your time zone. The plush has no clock of its own and does not need one.
- An answer already being spoken is never cut off. When the window closes, it is the next question that is refused, and the toy gives a short cue instead of answering.
What the child notices
Inside the window nothing is different: press the button, talk, get an answer. Outside it the plush lights up purple and stays quiet, which children read the same way they read a toy whose batteries have run out.
Make the answers shorter and simpler
Simple conversation makes the plush talk the way another child would: one or two short sentences, sometimes only a few words, and it will not ask a question back just to keep the conversation going.
Device menu, then Profile settings, then How the toy behaves
- It is one switch, and it changes the length and the tone of the answers rather than the subjects. The plush still answers the same questions, it just answers them briefly.
- It suits a younger child, a child who finds a chatty toy tiring, and the half hour before bed.
- Switched off, the plush answers at its normal length and will offer a question back to keep the conversation going.
- The child's age, and the few lines you write about them in the same screen, shape the answers too. Simple conversation is the blunt control, the profile is the fine one.
How loud it speaks, how bright it glows
The response volume and the status light have a slider each, from zero to one hundred per cent, in the same screen as the rest of the toy's behaviour.
Device menu, then Profile settings, then How the toy behaves
- Response volume sets how loudly the plush speaks. A living room and a bedroom rarely want the same value.
- LED brightness sets how strongly the status light glows. Even at a low value a faint glow remains, so the light is still readable in a dark room without lighting it up.
- The two together are what turns a living-room toy into a bedside one: quiet voice, dim light.
- As the batteries weaken the plush speaks more quietly by itself, to make them last longer, whatever the slider says. A volume that drops noticeably is the sign to change them.
Send the toy to sleep from your phone
Put to sleep, in the device menu, sends the plush to sleep straight away. It then stays unavailable until somebody presses its button, so it cannot answer and cannot be talked awake.
Device menu, then Put to sleep
- The app asks you to confirm, because the toy goes quiet in somebody else's hands.
- It only works while the toy is online. A plush that is already asleep, switched off or off the network is one the app will not let you send anywhere.
- Left alone, the plush falls asleep by itself to save the batteries. Sending it to sleep is the same state, reached sooner.
- A press of its button wakes it and it is ready within a few seconds.
- The action is written into the parental zone, so the other parent can see that the toy was sent to sleep rather than having broken.
It is not an off switch
Sleep ends the conversation and saves the batteries, it does not power the toy down. Before a longer break, switch the battery holder off and take the batteries out.
It remembers the networks it has joined
The plush stores up to five Wi-Fi networks and gets itself back online without you, so taking it to the grandparents or on holiday does not mean setting it up again. It joins whichever of its saved networks it can actually see.
Device menu, then Connect to the internet
- Waking up, the plush first tries the network it used last, without scanning for anything. At home that is almost always the right one, and skipping the scan puts it back online sooner.
- If that network is not there, it scans and joins the strongest of its saved networks that is in range. Nothing to press, nothing to choose.
- Setting it up on a network it already knows needs no password. The app asks the toy which networks it has kept, marks those Saved in the list, and the toy connects with its own copy of the password.
- A sixth network pushes out the one used longest ago, and a network it joins successfully moves back to the front of the list.
- If the password has changed since, the toy says the network refused it and the app asks you for the new one, so the failure is never silent.
- Holding the toy's button for about five seconds erases all five at once. That is the thing to do before passing the plush on to somebody else, and it is not needed for anything else.
The passwords stay on the toy
A Wi-Fi password written into the plush never comes back out of it: the app asks for the names of the stored networks and nothing more. Those names stay on your phone too. We do not receive them, and they go into no analytics, because a list of network names locates a home more precisely than a street address does.
Where each setting is
Two screens hold all of it. The device menu is what you reach by tapping a plush on the Devices list, and Profile settings is one row inside that menu.
- Play enabled, daily time limit
- Profile settings, under Play permission
- Simple conversation
- Profile settings, under How the toy behaves
- Response volume, LED brightness
- Profile settings, under How the toy behaves
- Child's name, age and description, the toy's name
- Profile settings, under About the child
- Share with the other parent
- The device menu
- Put to sleep
- The device menu
The same menu also holds the Wi-Fi wizard, the stories, the subscription, the firmware update and the in-app guide. The quick start walks through the ones you need on the first day.
The app is free, the settings are all in it
You install the parent app once, during setup, and it is the same app for every plush in the house. There is nothing to buy inside it: the settings on this page are part of the toy.
The parent app is out on Google Play.
