Anki, Jibo, and Kuri: What We Can Learn from Social Robots That Didn't Make It
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Anki’s landed cost was nearly 65% of the MSRP. Retailers take 30-35% margins. This leads to paper-thin margins for marketing, low working capital for production and other opex. You will not survive in a market like that.
I work with ex-employees from Anki. It was a well-loved product/company. If it had survived another 3-4 years, they would have seen light.
Source: I work with retail teams with products in similar categories (https://www.playosmo.com/).
These robots (I have a Cozmo and a Jibo) are at their core a novelty robot or "thing" attached to a voice assistant. Voice assistant are not "social" except to the autistic and those that have spent too much time reading about socializing in the academic literature rather than actually interacting with humans not in a study.
So they can't be social, and the robot part at the end of the day is basically a toy whose whiz-bang wears off rather quickly. I find a lot of the research on emotional connections to be a bit self-serving. There are some people that end up attached to a weird head thing, but most require something a bit smarter, it does not make a sizeable market.
Anyone in the toy industry could have looked at their financials and known this was a shitty idea, because at the end of the day none of these products have demonstrated that they are more than a toy attached to a voice assistant. Blaming retail channel cuts is a bit rich.
Anyways aibo came out around 2000 I think, if social robots really are viable as a product category we should be way past the Newton stage by now.
" I sometimes hear that social robots are just voice agents with little added value. But when you hear how the handful of existing users reported on the emotional reactions they had to social robots, this does not seem to be true. Researchers have shown this emotional response in prior laboratory experiment and field studies, but we now have much more evidence for this happening real people’s homes.
On the recent RoboPsych podcast on the demise of Jibo, Tom Guarriello resigns his admitted cynicism and speaks of Jibo as having an emotional effect on him and his partner. He even got choked up when Jibo said goodbye (his partner shed a tear), and his language describing the robot is often passionate and emotional. Many others have shared similar reactions.
This is not just a novelty effect. Having been around social robots for so long, I can anecdotally support what we know from a large body of academic research. A physical thing in your space, moving with and around you, provides an emotional grip that no disembodied conversant can. Seasoned engineering professors smile at their robots making an odd gesture, and often cannot help but suspend their belief that this collection of motors and control signals is merely that. I have found that very few engineers remain indifferent to viewing the famous Boston Dynamics BigDog kicking video, even if they have worked with robots for decades. "
I think even in the cases of those prone to become attached to non-living items, the attachment is not necessarily a long-term bond.
Further, suspending disbelief, and anthropomorphizing everyday mechanical things is not very compelling... I have felt bad for my car.. I think an emotional bond with a car is a pretty typical thing in the US.. However, regardless of how strong and consuming it is, most people don't treat it as a substitute or even similar to a social relationship.
I don't use any of the voice actions but its awareness in the environment I feel is enough. It sits in the kitchen and has prime position.
I could not classify it as a "Buddy" or "Friend" but I care about it enough not to turn it off.
I think the next stage for these social robots is to learn(AI) unique personalities. eg. Movements, noises, faces. So no two social robots are the same.
But the barrier of entry to that is high, and the quality of course won't compare at this juncture. I'd love to see more "build your own" type setups which give you the level of power and polish of a commercial assistant but let you really design what you want it to do.
(I feel like the assistant and robot conversations are the same here. Put it in a body or put it on a screen, but that "personality" you interact with should be yours, not off-the-shelf.)
But looking at SciFi and what the article talks about it seems to me we need intelligence or beauty combined with constant exposure.
We can't get constant exposure since we don't have the tech for a robot to traverse a house.
We can't get great intelligence, since to be frank when this gets solved it won't be to make money on social robots.
So we need beauty with as much fake intelligence as we can muster and to hack the Gordian Knot of movement, which would be Teddy Ruxpin?
If you watch the videos for these products they are full of hype and silly use cases. At the end of the day these things have consequences.
We have a house full of robots. Most are useless. Most saw use for minutes out of the box and have been collecting dust for years.
If you sell products based on exaggerated claims and unrealistic use cases, failure is the only possible limit state for the business equation you have created.
Solve real problems with real solutions.
I don't want something like that talking with a remote server.
Building a product which has complex, meaningful interactions with users, as a "social" robot is expected to do, is a difficult problem which will take a lot of time and effort to get right. It's not something that can be solved by a couple of developers in a few months as a Kickstarter project.
https://www.therobotreport.com/anki-vector-teardown-complex-...
Disney-type artists, yes. Animatronic robots are getting better and better, and it is only a matter of time before they will be offering one-on-one interaction that is engaging to folks at one of the theme parks. In fact that is where I expect to see the next level of social robotics happening.