Next up is AI for collectibles

There were AI toys, companions and robots everywhere at this year’s CES, but among the horde of shambling plushies and glowing emoji eyes, two caught my eye. HeyMates and Buddyo are both betting that the collectible figure boom will return with AI-powered revenge, allowing us to chat with sports stars and superheroes from our desks.

The core concept of both is this: take a cute character and stick it on a smart base with a speaker, a microphone, and maybe a blinking light ring or two. Then use a companion app to run a simple LLM chatbot based on the character, so you can talk to Albert Einstein about relativity or Darth Vader about crushing dissident forces, with a few funny wake-up words and the odd cheesy joke.

Additionally, the two startups I met this week are different. Olli is the more established of the…