
Anki, Jibo, and Kuri: What We Can Learn from Social Robots That Didn't Make It - worldvoyageur
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/anki-jibo-and-kuri-what-we-can-learn-from-social-robotics-failures
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Cherian
The article does not capture the complexity of running a hardware business.

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/](https://www.playosmo.com/)).

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penis111
Honestly, I don't think it matters. I agree with the basic points the article
makes as being more salient.. After all, despite the complexities, there are
successful hardware businesses.

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.

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scottishcow
If there really is a Newton of social robots the credit should go to Sony’s
aibo — the vaguely Japanese-sounding names of Jibo, Kuri, etc. are dead
giveaways of who’s the real OG here.

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.

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worldvoyageur
A particularly salient comment for me in the article was:

" 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. "

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penis111
At the extreme end of the spectrum people try to marry sex dolls and stuffed
animals. There is a continuum of how attached people will get to inanimate or
artificially animate objects. So it would also not be surprising if studying
engineers and psych academics that you will get skewed data - groups not known
for being on the right side of the bell curve for human social interaction
skills.

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.

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tlarkworthy
Social robotics is a bit narrow. We got domestic robots (Roomba etc.)!
Personally, I think the market has spoken: robots that do something useful are
appreciated enough for businesses to be built. Robots cannot replace dogs, we
have good dogs already, replacing a human is sci-fi.

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etoxin
I bought a Anki Vector about a year ago to tinker with the sdk. After messing
with the sdk, I left it turned on for the duration of the year.

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.

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ocdtrekkie
Ultimately the reason I moved towards the "write my own assistant" thing is
that I wanted it to be personal to me. Alexa, Siri, Google are literally
corporate entities you can chat with, no matter how much they dress it up with
jokes.

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.)

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yayr
Most of those toys have a major conceptual flaw imo. Kids love stories -
listening, watching and playing them. They often enjoy simple toys much more
than complex ones, if they are more flexible in story play. If a „social“
robot seems too stupid quickly or too complex to handle for story play it is
quickly out of the game

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aaron695
I think photos might have helped the article.

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?

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robomartin
These failures can be boiled down to a single word: Hype.

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.

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kats
I think that people who like robotics just want to make cool robots, and all
of these robotics startups fail because they don't have product-market fit. I
remember being very surprised at the $300 price of Anki's Vector robot. These
startups should be validating the viability of their products much earlier.

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JohnFen
While I don't really understand the appeal of social robots beyond being
sophisticated toys, the failures of Jubi and (I think) Anki have given me a
strong reason to avoid them -- they depend on an external server, and so if
the company fails, the robot becomes junk.

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mirimir
That struck me too. But for a different reason.

I don't want something like that talking with a remote server.

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duskwuff
I think there's a much more obvious lesson to be learned from at least some of
these companies.

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.

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nikofeyn
that may seem like the obvious lesson, but there is a more hidden lesson, at
least in the case of anki. i don't their failure had as much to do with the
interactions of vector than it did with the complex mechanical design.

[https://www.therobotreport.com/anki-vector-teardown-
complex-...](https://www.therobotreport.com/anki-vector-teardown-complex-
manufacturing/)

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zwieback
Voice-control has been a massive success but social robots have not. Why?
Because they are creepy like the Boston Dynamics stuff or toys like the ones
mentioned here. Maybe eventually an product that's attractive to the average
consumer will show up but we haven't seen it yet. The article makes some good
points about what's missing.

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Isamu
>Lesson 2: We need artists

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.

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bearcobra
Anki products are still on the shelves at my local Best Buy. I feel bad for
the people buying them as gifts not knowing that the discounted price is
because they're going out of business and will likely see reduced
functionality in the future

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cmoscoso
What we learn from websites that require JS to display text.

