Top Christmas Toy – My Friend Cayla

I was first introduced to My Friend Cayla at the Toy Fair in January, even though she was a prototype I knew she would be a big hit come Christmas time. By the time I got to meet her at Christmas in July she had definitely improved and she appeared high up in every predicted Top toys list.

My Friend Cayla is an interactive talking doll. Using Bluetooth connectivity she interacts with her free app to play games, tell stories and discuss photo albums. The app is available for free on iOS and Android and is required to use any of the interactive functionality.

My friend Cayla can also answer certain types of questions when connected to a strong wifi connection. She can answer maths questions, spelling questions and even things like the capitals of countries. She can also answer questions about herself such as favourite colour and food. Cayla using Google translate to turn your voice into text and then search for the answer. She has a built in safe search and you can also program other blocked words into her using the app.  We

My friend Cayla comes with a hairbrush and a mirror for when the kids just want to play with her or for when you dont want to give over your technology to them.

You can also get a My Friend Chloe.

Both girls really like Cayla and she will be a sought after toy this Christmas. I do really like Cayla but we did come up against two issues which I would like to highlight just in the name of fairness.

1) We initially believed there was a fault with our Cayla doll as she did not respond to any of our questions, however we have a poor internet signal in our house and as soon as we took Cayla to a friends house who has a strong connection we found that Cayla listened and responded perfectly. If you cant stream a youtube video you might have trouble with Cayla.

2) Cayla’s bluetooth signal didn’t connect although we could hear that she was switched on by the static noise coming from her belly. We replaced the batteries and found she connected perfectly. The batteries need to have a lot of charge in them to work like they would be any robotic toy or camera.

As you can see both of these issues were easily resolved but they did have me a little frustrated to begin with. Thankfully the My Friend Cayla website has a great set of FAQs that helped me to resolve my issues.