The new social robot Jibo, billed as "the world's first family robot." Photos: Jibo Inc.

by Brett Davis

It plays music. It turns on the lights. It reads books to your children. It plays emails and voice messages. It takes family photos. It guards your house.



It’s a rotund little robot named Jibo, and by next December, it could be in your home if its successful crowdfunding appeal succeeds in getting it to market.



Jibo is the brainchild of Cynthia Breazeal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and pioneer in the world of social robotics. The team behind the new company she formed includes technologists from iRobot, Apple, IBM, Symantec, Zynga and more.



The robot packs a lot of hardware in its 11-inch-tall, six-pound frame. He sports two color stereo cameras with 360-degree sound localization, so if you talk to him from behind, he can swivel his flat, high-definition touchscreen “face” around to you. He has full-body touch sensors, two premium speakers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, all running on a Linux-based ARM processor.



And, yes, Jibo is a he, according to his maker. An FAQ page on the company’s website says, “Jibo is gendered male.” You can’t change his name to Bucky or Sparky, either, at least not yet.



“In the current release, you have to use the name Jibo to address him,” the same FAQ says. “Future updates may allow for the possibility to give your Jibo a new name of your choice.”



Breazeal has worked on social robots for years, including at MIT’s Media Lab, home of social robots such as Nexi and Leonardo, earlier efforts to create sociable robots. Unlike some of those robots, Jibo doesn’t try to mimic a human or animal face.



“Key to Jibo is his ability to create relationships with users, as a persona himself. Jibo is a ‘social robot,’ and while other robots strive to be humanoid — with legs that mimic human gate, with physical presence that resembles the human physique — Jibo strives to establish a relationship,” Steve Chambers, executive chairman of Jibo Inc., writes in an email to Mission Critical. “It’s a philosophical difference and belief that key to establishing relationship isn’t trying to have Jibo walk up a flight of stairs but to have him show empathy and respond to consumers.”



Having a screen-faced Jibo also avoids the uncanny valley, which is where robots that try to look human but fail can come off as creepy, Chambers notes.



“Jibo tries hard to be a warm, attentive, responsive companion. Having him not be anthropomorphized was key to establishing his presence as such,” he writes.



Jibo can learn things about you — such as your favorite takeout food — information that it stores in the cloud, which the company says is protected data. In fact, should your Jibo conk out and need to be replaced, the new one can “learn” everything the old one knew.



The system depends heavily on speech recognition technology, according to Roberto Pieraccini, the company’s director of conversational technology, in a video blog post hosted by the company.



Having robots understand speech is a challenge enough, but “building conversational technology for a robot like Jibo has many more challenges,” he says.



One of those is the fact that there is no button to push to let Jibo know you are talking to it. He also needs to ignore your voice unless he knows you are talking to him, as well as filter out background noise such as traffic or television.



Jibo approached the market using the crowdfunding website Indiegogo. The company sought $100,000; it ended up raising nearly $2.3 million, wrapping up the campaign on 14 Sept. The most popular package allowed funders to obtain the first robots for $499.



The first units are expected to ship to developers in September 2015, with consumer units arriving in December.

COMPETITION

There are a few robots similar to Jibo coming to market, although few with the technological firepower behind Jibo. One is Buddy, the first product from France’s Blue Frog Robotics.



Like Jibo, Buddy has a flat-screen face, although in its case it’s actually a tablet. Unlike Jibo, Buddy is intended to be mobile, and it has hands, although it’s not clear what they can do.



“It is a companion robot, 45 centimeters [17.7 inches] high, which can manage your household automation devices, help seniors at home, entertain or contribute to the education of your kids and assist you in the personal surveillance of your home,” the company says.



Another competitor — albeit a much taller one — is Adam, from Italy’s Hands Co. Adam is more like Jibo in some ways, in that it has a screen for a face and no arms and it’s intended to learn from its owner’s behavior over time.



Like Jibo, it’s designed to interface with home automation, allowing it to switch on lights, adjust thermostats and the like. It can also play music and take photographs.



Chambers says there are several factors that set Jibo apart from his competition in the market.



“The ability to move in 3-D space. The ability to ‘hear’ and orient himself, due to an ability to move almost 360 degrees. The ability to disambiguate family members, and to recognize people and address them as … individual people,” he writes. “The way Jibo moves — based on ‘line of action’ animation principles — is unique to his character. “



As a social robot that lives in the home, “a key foundation to Jibo’s uniqueness is how we have connected audio processing, visual processing, persona and relationship intelligence and expressive movement, together,” Chambers writes. “Doing so requires advanced architecture and software that make Jibo — Jibo.” 

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