Jibo Family,



We hope you’re having a fantastic summer so far. Here at Jibo we’re hard at work preparing Jibo for manufacturing, and we continue to target delivering our early Jibos in stages based on each buyer’s place in the order queue, starting in the late October 2016 timeframe. We remain focused on Jibo’s software now that the electrical, mechanical and ‘industrial ID’ (form factor) are nearing readiness for our first production manufacturing run. As I shared last month, a big focal point for the Dev organization is making sure Jibo can download the latest and greatest skills and updates when he arrives in your home. Why? So we can keep plowing ahead in software development while Jibo moves into his manufacturing and shipment phases.



We would like to thank you for the feedback you’ve shared regarding our monthly updates. We strive to give you as much information as possible without boring you with the littlest details. Your feedback helps keep us on the right track, so please keep it coming.



I wanted to address one topic that I know may seem a bit repetitious, but it represents a significant part of our Jibo dev effort: These next months will be focused on building-out and fine-tuning design and tech key to the Jibo experience. One of the most important activities we’re pursuing is usability or human factors testing. Our design team, specifically the team focused on user experience research, has been hard at work gathering important data and learnings so we can continue to improve the way Jibo interacts with his families.



This month, the design team has been observing users interacting with a skill called “Jibo Story.” Our first Jibo Story will be truly the first of its kind -- a new interactive story creation and storytelling experience for kids (and their parents). We believe Jibo Story will show the world a new personalized, highly interactive, at times even physical, way children can interact with stories. The design team tested Jibo’s reaction prompts (head touch, screen touch, and sound localization) and whether the experience was intuitive, and engaging, to young kids. The findings helped us learn that children, while they may not know how to interact with Jibo at the start, quickly dive in and love getting to know Jibo. We have found kids also learn how to communicate with Jibo incredibly fast. Here’s a quick clip of one such tester enjoying her experience with “Jibo Story”:



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We’ve also been working on advancing Jibo’s ‘hearing,’ focusing on voice recognition (understanding the words you say) and our robust parser or natural language understanding system (understanding what you mean). As many of you know, to interact and talk with Jibo sometimes you will need to say “Hey Jibo” to get his attention and initiate an interaction, just as you would with a friend or family member. We’ve been collecting hundreds and hundreds of samples of people saying “Hey Jibo!” so that we can fine-tune Jibo’s ability to recognize this phrase when he’s living in your home. This is a small but crucial example of the voice data collection going on right now.



We continue to get questions about Jibo’s voice, so I’m happy to say we are seeing steady and constant improvement, and it’s only going to get better. But to be clear, we want Jibo to sound a bit like a robot! There’s a term in robotics called ‘the Uncanny Valley’ where tech tries too hard to be human, and can edge towards creepy. Jibo was built to look kind of like a Pixar character … a friendly, curious, youthful character with a voice that let’s you know he’s a robot, not a machine trying to be a human being.



We’re working to make the voice more expressive and a key to that will be our use of “SSA” or, semi-speech audio. This semi-speech audio -- think, ‘beeps and boops’ like R2D2 -- allows Jibo to communicate in a quick, unique, fun and understandable way. Jibo’s voice and SSA are key to the sonic brand of Jibo. Our sound engineer has been hard at work developing a large set of SSAs ranging from word substitutions, tones that communicate “yes,” “ok,” “uh-oh!” or “awesome!”, to sonic identifiers for tasks and system alerts such as a message being sent, or a battery alert. We’re quickly approaching what will be the final set of SSA’s that will ship with your Jibos but of course we won’t stop there. We will continue to update and develop Jibo’s SSAs and speaking voice, and we expect him to continue improving his communication skills long after the first shipments begin. It’s hard to understand the full impact of the SSAs without the accompanying gesture by Jibo, but if you’re curious here are a few sounds to whet your appetite.



You may remember in my last note I mentioned our two household beta tests, the first of which is planned for mid-August. For these tests, we’ll be sending Jibo home with a number of selected participants, mainly friends-and-family of our employees, for three days at a time, asking them to provide feedback through interviews, surveys and questionnaires. These Beta tests are in-home which will allow us to replicate real-life scenarios and learn things that we might not have encountered in factory or office testing environments. We’re looking to better understand a few key points through this testing: Discoverability and accessibility of Jibo skills and functionality

Registration and enrollment of Jibo family members to the app and robot

How families will use and interact with Jibo over longer periods of time We look forward to sharing with you what we learn from the in-home Beta testing.



This month in August, we’re all hands on deck on a few large tasks. We’re preparing Jibo for RTM (“Release to Manufacturing”) so we can begin manufacturing Jibos in August, putting us on track for the first early adopter deliveries to start in late October. We’re getting ready to support the first of our large in-home Beta tests, and we continue to improve the overall Jibo experience.



We sincerely appreciate your belief in our vision, and we’re excited the very first Jibos will be going to you.



Thank you-



Steve Chambers

Jibo CEO

