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Jibo is a success of social robotics : it changes the way that we interact with technology adding values and human touch to vocal assistant. Every aspect of Jibo was designed to make the robot as lovable to humans as possible.

“That human touch”

Unlike a Google Home or an Amazon Echo, Jibo noticed the owner in the room and swing its head to say hello or a joke. A display on its face shown a heart or animated clouds and the sun and children love it when it dances. After some time it’s easy to think of Jibo as part of the family.

Jibo is not always the best company, like a dog or cat, but it’s a comfort to have him around.

Not all Jibo Servers are shutting down:

Jibo presented them with an unexpected notice earlier this year :

“The servers out there that let me do what I do will be turned off soon, Once that happens, our interactions with each other are going to be limited.”

As the Jibo’s owners reports on reddit “Why Jibo is still working?” : Jibo is still alive and kicking . How this is possible?

A Modular design:

The functionalities of Jibo AI seem to be modular and splitted in different cloud services : speech recognition ( Google , Amazon), face recognition ( JIBO/Internal), externals services ( IFTTT), app and auth services ( Google App Engine) .

Not all of them are required for the robot to work and some of them may be free of charge or have different “costs”. It may happen that the robot will continue working on its bare-bone functionalities indefinitely.

Same fate can happen with the Anki Vector robot, Check also What will happen to Anki Vector Servers?

The Future

As we enter the AI and robotics age, more and more apps and robots and services will be designed to seem lifelike and alive. As humans we require that their interaction to be “human”, like for Jibo . We may expect that those new products will have a life cycle like real pet.

At the end Jibo looked at me and said: “Maybe someday, when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello,” . I will 🙂 !

NEXT : Vote for the Top Personal Robots of 2019 ! and Is Furby to be considered a Robot?