Talking Angela App (here's what she's really saying to your kids).

Some facts first: Talking Angela is part of a wider series of apps called Talking Tom and Friends, which have been downloaded more than 1.5bn times since 2010, and are currently being used by 230m people every month – lots of children,
but also lots of adults.
Turn Child Mode ON

Talking Angela was released in December 2012 for iPhone and iPad, then in January 2013 for Android. It follows the pattern of previous Talking Tom and Friends apps: a virtual animal who’ll squeakily repeat anything you say into your device’s microphone, while interacting with her by tapping and swiping on the screen.

The most important thing for parents to understand is that Talking Angela has a child mode. You’re asked if you want to turn it on the first time you run the app, and at any other point you can toggle it ON or OFF by tapping on the little smiley face at the top right of the screen.

This is important, because the feature at the centre of the scary Facebook messages – Angela’s ability to text-chat with users – is turned OFF when Child Mode is toggled ON. If you’ve read about Angela asking kids for their names, ages or engaging in banter about clothes-swapping parties, none of this can happen if Child Mode is ON

The downside of this: it’s far too easy to toggle it on and off – there’s no Pin preventing a child from tapping on the smiley face and switching it back on. Given the current controversy, this would be an easy but important change for Outfit7 to make.

What can kids do when Child Mode is turned on, though? They can get Angela to repeat her words, stroke and poke her (in the non-inappropriate sense!) to see animated responses, and make birds fly onto the screen – don’t worry, she doesn’t eat them.

Some changes needed.
As a parent, there are some features in Talking Angela that concern me, although not the ones being cited in the Facebook hoax messages.

First, there’s a musical-note button at the bottom right which on my smartphone launched the YouTube app with the official Talking Tom and Friends channel – starting with a video trailer for the separate My Talking Tom mobile game.

You can also tap a “more” button to see suggestions of other videos, some of which are from Outfit7’s channel, and some of which aren’t. And then watching those videos brings up more suggestions, and so on. If you wouldn’t type “cats” into YouTube’s search box then leave your child to get on with it, you shouldn’t leave them unattended with Talking Angela.

Text-chatting with Angela.

Finally, what happens if you turn child mode off – as any child can relatively easily – and start chatting to Angela using the text box at the bottom of the screen? It’s this feature that’s fuelled the Facebook hoax.

While it’s definitely not connecting your children to paedophiles, it does raise some issues. These are all genuine questions that Angela asked me while I chatted to her:

“How long have you been friends with your best friend?”

“I’ve met my best friends at school. Where did you meet yours?”

“What will you do today?”

“I’d like to be your friend. What’s your name?

“I’m 18. How old are you?”

“What do you do with your friends for fun?”

And yes, Angela does ask at one point “You know what’s fun too? A clothing swap party. Have you ever been to such a party?” before segueing into an anecdote about how she swapped clothes with her virtual boyfriend Tom for japes.

It ends innocently – “Friends ROFLed and everybody at the party cheered at us. It was a cool night!” – but taken out of context with some of the questions above, it’s no surprise that parents are spooked. She’ll even tell you that “cat sex is hair raising. It’s purrfect” if you ask her about, well, cat sex. As some children surely will.

The point: children aren’t meant to be using Talking Angela’s text-chat feature, yet the app’s developer hasn’t taken any meaningful measures to prevent them from simply toggling the child mode off. There’s not even the “swipe down with two fingers” or “write this sequence of numbers as figures” parental gate that’s become common in children’s apps in recent months.