Meet Winston, a friendly, yellow, animated character who has actual conversations with kids on The Winston Show; a ToyTalk speech-recognition powered storytelling app that launched in September.

Winston asks questions and interprets kids' answers through ToyTalk's PullString technology to respond humorously and appropriately, for example; Winston: So tell me...are you a giant? Player: Yes. Winston: Oh, I knew you were. Are you an Earth-dwelling giant or do you live at the top of a beanstalk?

The Winston Show is an English-language app, but apparently, Winston can also understand Martian!

ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob says that when they tested a new story that invites kids to play the part of an alien attacking Winston's spaceship, "there was a seven-year-old boy who says back to us 'Oogy oogy! click click click!' We said 'What is he doing?' and someone said 'I think he's speaking Martian?' And it turned out that's what he was doing--he spoke Martian to us for a good 10-minute run, with intonation and gestures--it was language, even though it made no sense."

Jacob later found that the kid often spoke Martian at home with his parents. "So we asked him, on a scale of one to 10, how well do you think Winston understood you?' And he said '10' So he was totally convinced he was getting the responses he should have been."



This was the kind of make-believe that guides Season Two of The Winston Show, which began rolling out the first of four weekly episodes on February 27. Season One mainly focused on a quiz show and fireside chat hosted by Winston and his round little sidekick Ellington - but a new installment released in December, "In the Movies," cast viewers in roles in a space adventure ("Squabble Amongst the Stars") or detective mystery ("Winston Sly, Private Eye").

"We saw kids start to really pretend they were an alien or a detective," says Jacob, Pixar's former CTO. According to FastCo:

Since founding ToyTalk with three other Pixar alums, Jacob has hired another eight former employees of the groundbreaking animation studio; former Pixar employees now make up half the company. "It was an important moment in our journey, in the sense that I did not expect kids to play make believe with us that directly. It seemed like if I had walked in and pitched that, it would have been hard to get kids into it, but it turned out it took legitimately zero effort. Winston says, 'I'm a spaceship commander--oh my gosh an alien, put him on screen!' and it puts you on the camera, and you're an alien. And the kid's like 'Awesome, I'm an alien!' We thought, that's pretty special. We really can get the show and Winston focused on make believe. So Season Two went in that direction, and we play make believe with kids conversationally through the majority of the show."

Season Two also introduces "Enchanted Forest," where you're the heir to the forest's throne and meet trolls, dwarves, and other characters, and "Doctor of the Heart," where Winston is in a hospital bed and the player has to diagnose his problem.



"Usually it starts out physical but ends up being psychological, as these things often are," says Jacob. ToyTalk's head of communications Christine Schirmer explains that the "Doctor of the Heart" sketch "was really the brainchild of one of our writers who noticed that a lot of children were using other opportunities in the app to be more vulnerable. For example, Winston asks 'How are you doing today,' and the kid would answer 'Not so well--I had a bad day at school.' In our old format, Winston would just kind of carry on. And our writers felt like wait a minute, if a child tells me he didn't have a good day at school, they're showing vulnerability, and I want Winston to be the type of person that will talk about that. So 'Doctor of the Heart' allows the child to be a little more vulnerable. As Winston describes his problems and what's happening to him, it gives the child the opportunity to talk about what's bothering them."

Another wonderful addition to Season Two is an episodic structure, in contrast to Season One's "buffet" approach where kids could jump around to different activities and skits. Now, each episode will include a mini-episode of each of the three main skits, broken up by shorter, interstitial bits that are more like gags than shows. For example, "a mouse, a piece of cheese, a trap, and you," explains Jacob. "The mouse is debating whether to eat the cheese, and you tell the mouse whether to eat it.

The Winston Show is available for free at the U.S. App Store.