To ask you about a talking pen (learning aid)

[InsomniacVampire]

I saw conversations about these on boards in my home country, apparently these are really popular over there. I am not sure whatactually they do, but they are learning aids for kids from 3yo, I saw a pen that comes with a bunch of books and other gadgets and you can also use it to record yourself.
Are these a thing in the UK? Anyone used anything similar and could recommend?) They get rave reviews.
Not really an AIBU unless- AIBU to want a talking pen for my kid now knowing what it does? 😂

Do you mean a Leap Reader? I don't know if you can record yourself with those though, so maybe you mean something else.

We have a variant of that - it's a Leap Start (same concept but it holds the book too). It's simultaneously one of the best and one of the worst toys my kids have owned. One of the best because they love it, spend hours playing with it and have learned a lot from it. But oh my goodness, the software... The device doesn't automatically recognise the books, it doesn't have enough memory for all of them - so you have to hook the device up to a laptop and download the content for the books you have. The software to do this is horrific. DH and I both have Computing degrees - it took us 4 hours and 3 laptops to get the damn thing working (and the company were no help whatsoever). Google shows this is not uncommon! And if you do finally manage to do it, it may not connect again next time and what worked to fix it previously may not work again. We ended up filling the entire device memory with random books and will make sure those are the only ones we buy now - not taking our chances on getting it connect again!

So it's a great toy, but no way would I recommend it, unfortunately!

Yes, that concept @LittleRedY0shi
It's a different brand over there and I could get it from Germany too in English (I think?) and I have not heard about any issues.
So how does it work- do you need physical copies of the books? what happens with the recorded ones, does it read them?

Yes, you need the physical books. Some are stories and you can get the pen to just read it to you, or it will say each word as you tap it. There's also games on each page (find this thing, etc). Other books are activity books rather than stories, with a greater variety of games. Different books are aimed at different levels, so you can get e.g. a maths one that's just based on simple number recognition and counting, or a maths ones that features multiplication, different kinds of graphs, etc

Are these easy to get (the books)- is there a variety?
I will have a look around as having a UK based pen my be easier than getting one over from EU...