Aren’t you excited about developments in robotics? Each new robot that’s being released to the consumer market comes a step closer to the full-blown, almost human-like artificial companions we have read about in science fiction stories when we were young.
Just admit it, you are still affected by seeing images of R2D2 or Buck Rogers’ Twiki too right?
And admitted, until now most home robots were only cool and got attention until their novelty wore off but we expect this new robot may change this pattern. Its overwhelming succesful funding campaign on Indiegogo is an indication we may be right here.
Meet Jibo, the latest member of the personal robot familiy. Jibo, an attempt to humanize technology, represents the next step towards welcoming robots into our daily lifes. The the social companion robot features both impressive hardware as well as clever, state of the art software making it an interesting innovation.
Jibo, with its minimalist yet friendly appearance -it is deliberately designed to resemble Wall-E’s “EVE”– ‘wakes up’ when you come home or out of bed, greets you, turns towards you when talking to you proactively helps you with what you are doing,
The $500 companion robot acts as a handsfree helper, is a cameraman, recognizes your face and voice, talks back to you, entertains, notifies you with reminders, informs you about (voice) messages.
Just like tablets, or Siri or Google Now it can pull up information from the web or an app. But Jibo can also act as a teleconferencing device, or can be used to queue up books or videos.
The World’s First Family Robot connects to your home, making it smarter by for example turning on the lights. It can order your favorite Thai take-out food since it learns about your preferences.
It for example can help you cooking and what’s more it can do so proactively since it recognizes what you are doing.
The social companion robot sports a round base that plugs into a standard wall outlet and features a 5.7 inch round edged screen.
We can see how cynics would call it an ennobled tablet. Enthusiasts could call it a leap closer to truly intelligent personal robots we know from science fiction.
Even though it’s still not as intelligent and capable as the robots of the future we perceive Jibo somewhat as a tablet, household robot hybrid.
It doesn’t walk or have feelings but it sure can do a whole lot more than the tablets we currently use as our electronic home companions. At $500, comparable to price tag on a quality tablet we can’t wait to welcome a Jibo into our homes.
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The developers, under lead by social robots pioneer, Cynthia Breazeal, who is also director of MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group, expect to release Jibo to the consumer market before the 2015 holiday season
Pre-order now for $500 at MyJibo.com.
Last Updated on July 21, 2014 by Tyler