My Friend Cayla was made by the UK company Vivid in 2014. In the US My Friend Cayla was distributed by Genesis starting in 2015. Variants of the first wave with an extra accessory of a fabric backpack exist, these may be regional variants. A total of 9 dolls have been released.
Several versions of the dolls were shown of at trade shows but have no evidence of release. Unreleased dolls shown at the 2015 Toy Fair include a doll with pale skin, black hair and was wearing a blue outfit. This blue outfit was used for Chloe a red hair doll in the UK. The brunette doll was wearing a purple version of the blue outfit Chloe wears and the African American doll was wearing a different outfit with a green stripe shirt and a skirt with two layers. They both were released wearing the same outfit as Cayla.
My Friend Cayla dolls are 18-inch (46 cm) dolls. The dolls used speech recognition technology in conjunction with an Android or iOS mobile app to recognize a child’s speech and perform conversations with users. The doll used the internet to search what the user said, and then responded with data that it found online.
In 2015 multiple hackers demonstrated how the doll could be hacked. This caused worry with parents that their child would have their personal information stolen or that the dolls voice could be taken over by a dangerous stranger. In February 2017 the German Federal Network Agency notified parents that they were obliged to “destroy” any Cayla in their possession as it constitutes a concealed espionage device violating the German Telecommunications Act.
The official My Friend Cayla UK website is still up as of May 2025 however the website was hacked and altered at some point and was never repaired. To be safe no images have been downloaded from the site. Any images of the website shown here are screenshots of the website.
Dolls
Website
Images
Official Images
