Jibo

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.

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.