Bringing a complex new product to market is an intensive process fraught with problems. Getting hardware ready for manufacturing is often the easy part; it’s the software and regulatory compliance that’s often the most challenging. Here are three examples: Ford Motor Co., Velodyne LiDAR and Jibo.
What would your ideal robot be like? One that can change nappies and tell bedtime stories to your child? Perhaps you’d prefer a butler that can polish silver and mix the perfect cocktail? Or maybe you’d prefer a companion that just happened to be a robot? Certainly, some see robots as a hypothetical future replacement for human carers. But a question roboticists are asking is: how human should these future robot companions be?
Jibo got $16 million from Asian VCs to enable Jibo to speak and sell in Japan and China, while Blue River Technology got $17 million from a group of agricultural VCs to expand product development to new areas, as funding for robotic ventures continues to soar. UPDATED To include funding for Soft Robotics, Inc. Flyability, and Naïo Technologies.
1,000 Pepper robots are selling each month from a big-dollar venture between SoftBank, Alibaba and Foxconn; Jibo just raised another $16 million as it prepares to deliver 7,500+ units in March and April of 2016; and Buddy, Rokid, Sota and many others are poised to deliver similar forms of social robots.
Finding the right approach to automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been a critical step in Jibo’s design: get it right and the experience will be great; get it wrong, and it could really take away from the interactions Jibo’s owners have with him. In this interview, Jibo’s Head of Advanced Conversational Technologies Roberto Pieraccini talks about the direction the company’s engineering team has taken with ASR.
Jibo may be a robot, but the last thing the team wants is for Jibo to sound like a robot. In these two video interviews, Jibo’s design team talks about how they selected Jibo’s voice, how that then manifests itself as the voice you’ll hear when you interact with Jibo, as well as the engineering challenges of Text-To-Speech (TTS) technology and how the team solved for them.
Through the Jibo SDK, developers have high-level access to Jibo’s audio processing, visual processing, persona and interaction, and movement capabilities. The SDK gives developers the tools to build a wide range of Jibo Skills for personal enjoyment or as a business opportunity. We sincerely believe developers have a huge role to play in extending Jibo’s personality and capabilities, making him the social robot people are looking forward to being part of their lives.
Our most recent video update comes from our VP of Engineering Andy Atkins. Take a sneak peak inside the minds of our engineers as they finish our newest Jibo P2s, to find out what kinds of challenges and hurdles we have overcome in the past year.
There’s a race going on to see which AI solution providing personal assistance is welcomed by businesses, end users and consumers, and whether this will be physical or virtual.
In this development video, hosted by Jesse Gray & Matt Berlin of Team Jibo and the MIT Media Lab, we’ll discuss how Jibo uses movement, sound, LEDs, and screen graphics to communicate with people and convey emotion and intention.
Ever wonder why Jibo’s eye was designed as a ball? And why does he have only one eye instead of two? Check out this video with Jibo’s Lead Designer & Animator, Fardad Faridi, as he briefly describes the nature and design of Jibo’s eye. 
May 13, 2019
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