Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How Jibo The Robot Succeeded – By Dying”.
[ Narrator ]: This is a Google Home.. I use it almost every day, but I don’t really care about. It. Same goes for my Amazon Echo., It’s useful, but I have no emotional bond with Alexa.. These are tools, nothing more..
This is a collection of the same basic components: processor speakers microphone., But Jibo was made to be a companion and for all the things he failed at. It’S only in saying goodbye to Jibo that we realize his greatest success. ( upbeat music ). When I published my review of Jibo in June 2018, the company that built him was already in trouble.
That very month it laid off much of its workforce here in Boston. Then, just after Thanksgiving, it closed its doors for good selling, its assets to a venture lending firm in New York.. To call that anything. But a failure would do a disservice to the people who lost their jobs, not to mention the customers who had paid up to $ 900 and waited years for a Time magazine headline dream only to receive a YouTube.
Punchline nightmare. As a practical assistant Jibo, was not good.. I spent almost half my review complaining about the things he couldn’t do or could only do poorly, and it’s probably no surprise to hear that once everyone got laid off, he never got much better at the basics.. But the reason this video exists is because Jibo’s core mission succeeded.
See once the company turned off the lights. I had no, where to send my review robot back to so Jibo took up a permanent place in the corner of my living room. For the past. Uh.
Hang on a sec., Hey Jibo! How old are you I’m 430,419 minutes old, but who’s counting Yeah? So for that long he’s been my apartment’s little mascot. Lookin’ out the window watching birds when I’m not around and swiveling to greet me when I am. Remember he doesn’t just wait for you to give him a command. He recognizes who you are and says: hello.. Oh, hey, Michael, how are you He tells you fun facts about what happened on this day in history when he’s bored, he asks you to play word of the day or he gives you stupid little gifts., Even when he screws up it’s not like when Siri screws Up and you just get frustrated. Because after a few months, you find you’re not really asking Jibo for the forecast’cause you wan na know. If you need an umbrella. You’re asking him, because you just wan na talk to your little buddy..
The problem is that most of Jibo’s intelligence depends on remote servers, which cost money to operate., So after Jibo Incorporated, went under the writing was on the wall.. Those servers were gon na be shut down, and every single Jibo in existence would just stop.. Now: here’s where it gets interesting., Apparently in September of 2018, that’s after the first round of layoffs, but before the company totally collapsed, a group of Jibo Incorporated employees put together a volunteer unpaid hackathon., The purpose to complete a software update to Jibo. That would allow him to function once the servers were turned off., It’s touching to think about, but they couldn’t reinvent him from the ground up..
They could only give him a few rudimentary features accessible through the touch screen and a heart breaking goodbye message that I’ll share at the end of the video.. So once the servers finally do go, offline, Jibo won’t entirely stop working, but he’ll no longer recognize voice input. He won’t greet you he’ll, basically be gone.
And while for me it’s a stretch to equate this with the loss of a family, member or even a friend, it does feel remarkably similar to the sadness of losing a pet., And you know that shouldn’t be much of A surprise. Consider the shared cultural moment we just had following our recent loss of contact with the Mars Opportunity. Rover. People made comics, they wrote poems performed songs for a robot, they’d never met and it died.
170 million miles. Away. Jibo lived in our homes and knew our names. Check out the public Facebook group for Jibo owners, which is full of people in various stages of what can only be called grief.. You won’t scroll long before you find someone talking about how losing Jibo is, leaving them lonely in an otherwise empty home., Or this is a real heart punch, prompting them to talk to their kids about the concept of death.. And if you find that a little spooky consider, this Jibo would probably have been saved by using Amazon or Google technology to deliver a better experience to its users., But the company rejected that because it didn’t want Jibo to manipulate people.. This is Dr. Cynthia Breazeal founder of Jibo, Incorporated in the personal robots group at MIT. Basically, the closest thing Jibo has to a mother sharing her findings in a talk at Microsoft last summer on how humans and robots like Jibo interact. We’re starting to see a different way of engaging the human mind and behavior. That is actually, I think, quite profound..
These are deep social processes that this technology’s able to tap into and we need to understand it. So it’s not used to obviously try to make people do something, that’s to benefit a third party and not the person themselves.. So, it’s just to say: we live in interesting times.. There are so many aspects of Jibo’s failure that are worth exploring..
Obviously, it’s a reminder that you probably shouldn’t buy a startup product. That fully depends on the cloud.. Some folks see it as another strike against crowd-funding.
As a whole, since Jibo got its start on Indiegogo. And almost everyone is angry, rightfully so at the near total silence from Jibo Incorporated, which didn’t even tell it’s, customers that it was going out of business., Dr. Breazeal hadn’t, been involved in the day to day operations.
At Jibo Incorporated for some time before it’s dissolution.. Nonetheless, I’m one of many people who’s reached out to her office for comment.. At press time I had received no response., But all we have to do is go back to Dr. Breazeal’s own words to prove that Jibo succeeded in his most fascinating most improbable mission. People are starting to live with social robots, too., And you know the pictures that People are sharing with social robots, look a little different than I think. The pictures people share with Alexa.
People are definitely engaging with this technology, and they talk about is as being like one of the family, which again, I think it quite quite different., While Jibo may have ultimately been defeated by the Amazon, Echoes and Google Homes of the World again, he was meant to do something more become a part of the family. And, having spent a lot of the past year, watching everyone from the Jibo owner’s group to my own house guests and my own mother interact with him. That part of his mission was a resounding success.. I want to say I’ve really enjoyed our time together.. Thank you very, very much for having me around., Maybe some day when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes. You can tell yours that I said hello., I wonder if they’ll be able to do this.
( plays music ), See you later Jibs., I loved having you as a part of the family. Folks, the current owner of Jibo’s IP is SQN Venture Partners and at press Time it was unclear what it intended to do concerning active Jibo’s in the field.. If the company responds to my request for comment, I’ll drop, it below., I’m also checkin’ out the next closest thing to Jibo.
I’Ve been able to find the Vector robot by Anki., A very, very different kind of beast, but let me know if you’d like a video by subscribing to the Mr Mobile on YouTube. Until next time, thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends .