Jibo - World's First Family Robot (pre-launch)

The robot is slightly uncanny, reminiscent of GLaDOS from Portal. Watch the video.

So I spoke to Cynthia and some of her team prior to launch about Jibo and marketing a crowdfunding campaign (full disclosure: I am not paid nor working for Jibo). She was absolutely awesome to talk to and I thought this project was awesome, albeit not fully understanding it at the time. For those of you that don't know Cynthia, she did an awesome TED Talk about personal robots: http://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia...

I really love the interface work happening in the social robots space, such as the physical animations, graphical animations and general tone of communication. I pulled out my credit card to pre-order one, but Fall 2015 is an awful long time away. That said I'm bullish on this project and look forward to watching them get to market.

This is a huge first step in brining robots into the home. The first of many to come. It's upsetting they weren't able to get funding before announcing what they were building. Would have much rather have heard about this months before the dev kits launched rather than years. I want to start developing for this thing TODAY.

TC's @kylebrussell just posted a hands-on video with Jibo. I'd love to see them create an API for this.

It's so cute! @rrhoover API would be be brilliant.

@michaelschultz they were seed funded by CRV over a year ago http://www.crv.com/entrepreneurs... http://www.xconomy.com/boston/20...

Backed Jibo via Indiegogo and received an beta unit that won't charge. Got a replacement. The hardware looks and feels cheap. Robot is loud and does not have much AI compared to Alexa or Google assistant. Limited functionalities and apps.

Pros:

Cool idea, nice dance moves

Cons:

AI really sucks, creepy behavior of tracking you.