The article does not capture the complexity of running a hardware business.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Source: I work with retail teams with products in similar categories (<a href="https://www.playosmo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.playosmo.com/</a>).
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.<p>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.
A particularly salient comment for me in the article was:<p>"
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.<p>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.<p>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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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.
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
I think photos might have helped the article.<p>But looking at SciFi and what the article talks about it seems to me we need intelligence or beauty combined with constant exposure.<p>We can't get constant exposure since we don't have the tech for a robot to traverse a house.<p>We can't get great intelligence, since to be frank when this gets solved it won't be to make money on social robots.<p>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?
These failures can be boiled down to a single word: Hype.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Solve real problems with real solutions.
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.
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.
I think there's a much more obvious lesson to be learned from at least some of these companies.<p>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.
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.
>Lesson 2: We need artists<p>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.
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