And after writing all of that, I go back to the page and double check the price...

I had originally misread the page on my initial skim and thought the price was over $2000 USD. I think maybe I had misread the number of backers as a price tag or something. Seeing that the price is actually $500-$600 USD is more in line with what I would expect for something like that. Still, pretty expensive for a glorified Furby whose speech recognition isn't going to work nearly as well as their demo video implies.

I'll be interested in seeing some hands on tests of the final shipping product. If it can get past the Kinect's problem of false-activating when people in the room are having normal conversations, it could be a fun development platform.