Teksta is a life-like interactive robotic puppy that responds to your voice, physical gestures, lights and sounds. There are five in the Teksta range: Blue, Pink, T-Rex, Kitty and Dalmatian. They are suitable for aged 5 and above.
Inside the box, it comes with a puppy, dog bone, a red ball and instructions. It requires 4 x AA for the puppy. For advanced programming, you can download the Teksta app from Apple store or Google play to have more fun with your puppy!
The puppy is very well made with flappy ears. All his limbs comes with a roller which means he is able to walk across all surfaces including carpet. Avoid walking across hair though which may get trapped in the rollers. The on/off button can be found on his collar which is very easy to press. On his head, there are two mode buttons to use with the app.
Ways of interacting with Teksta:
PLAYING: Place his red ball under his chin to get him to chew it. The magnet on the ball will stick onto his chin but sometimes the ball drops off quite easily. Teksta will make a begging noise for you to remove it.
EATING: Feed him by placing the bone under his chin and he will chew the bone. The light on the bone lights up like it is being charged. When Teksta is full, he stops chewing it and the light in the stops glowing.
CURIOSITY: He will sniff anything you place near his nose.
TRAINING: You can get him to sit, flip and stop. When Teksta is sitting down, children have to be careful as he might flip.
We downloaded the app and it very easy and intuitive to use with Teksta. There are features to get Teksta to sing and dance, feed him, control his bark etc. My children prefer to play with him via the app itself as they can feed him with dry food, canned food or table scraps. Teksta has a lot of similarities with Furby (which we had reviewed them before), where you interact with him through the respective app. Teksta has more functions than Furby as he can sit and walk.
I like the idea of having a robotic dog as there is no mess to clean up! I can see the benefits of having Teksta are to help children learn how to train a dog (hopefully in real life) and teach them to be patient. It is not very easy to train a dog even a robotic one! At times my children are not patient enough to wait for a response/action before firing off another action.
I can see older children would love this toy as Teksta is interactive and rewarding to play with.
Here’s Teksta’s training video, do take a look to see how it works:
Disclosure: We have received a sample to do an honest review.
