Skip to main content

Sony’s robot dog Aibo is headed to the US for a cool $2,899

By

Sony announced today that it’s going to release its robot dog Aibo in the US, following the brand’s relaunch in Japan last year. The new edition will be available to purchase in September for $2,899 and will be bundled with three years of Sony’s AI Cloud service as well as a variety of toys, including a pink ball, an “Aibone,” paw pads, and a charging station. The AI Cloud allows Aibo to send its daily activity back to Sony’s servers, which the company claims help shape the robot’s personality and let owners stay connected with their Aibo over Wi-Fi or LTE. The dog likely won’t ship until closer to the holidays, however, so prepare for a long wait.

The US version doesn’t sound or look much different from the one Sony showed off at CES this year. It incorporates a bunch of sensors, cameras, and actuators to activate the pup and keep it interactive. There’s a camera on its back to help it navigate to its charging pad, and its nose camera helps it find its Aibone and identify family members through facial recognition. It also responds to voice commands, and you can add tricks to its knowledge base through the companion Android / iOS Aibo app.

This is a limited edition product, although Sony hasn’t said exactly how many units are being made. So if you’re dead set on owning a robot dog, be ready for that preorder link soon.

Sony isn’t the only company thinking about a smart companion. Anki’s Vector robot (a grown-up version of its predecessor Cozmo) was just announced, too, with the idea that users can treat it more like a pet or play games and ask it questions. The key difference between it and Aibo is the price tag: Vector costs $250, although it doesn’t have the same AI backend as Sony and acts more similarly to a smart speaker.

Many tech companies are thinking of ways to make robots with personality, but so far, only Anki has seen any real success with a product in this category. It sold 1.5 million Cozmo robots since its launch in 2016, while Sony has sold roughly 11,000 units of its pricey Aibo in Japan since CES.



from The Verge - Teches https://ift.tt/2Lkrqwn
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The PlayStation Classic has a secret debug menu that can be reached with specific keyboards

By
Just a day after the release of the PlayStation Classic , the Retro Gaming Arts YouTube channel has discovered that you can access the emulator’s settings menu by plugging a keyboard into a free USB slot and hitting the Esc key. Doing so reveals a host of settings for the built-in open-source PCSX ReARMed emulator, potentially allowing access to options, including save states, controls, and cheats. The discovery has raised hope that some of the criticisms of the retro console , such as a limited game library and poor image quality, could soon be addressed with third-party modding. In the discovered menus, an option to “Load CD Image” is clearly visible, which suggests it might be possible to load additional games or perhaps just the better-performing 60Hz NTSC variants. An option to enable scanlines, the horizontal lines that allow an LCD screen to emulate the look of a traditional CRT monitor, is also present. Despite the discovery, it’s unlikely that the hardware limitations o
Post a Comment
Read more

With Toys R Us gone, Amazon wants to send out a holiday toy catalog of its own

By
Now that Amazon has helped kill off Toys R Us , it wants to borrow the retailer’s iconic print holiday toy catalog . The online behemoth is interested in creating its own print catalog to mail out and also be handed out at Whole Foods (which it owns), according to Bloomberg . Toys R Us was plagued with billions in debt when permanently closed last month — in part because of competition from online stores like Amazon . For many kids, its “Big Book” toy catalog was a staple of fall. The 100-page catalog would arrive near the end of October for kids to look through and create a wishlist before December. Now that the retailer is done, various companies are trying to scoop up the customers that headed to their shelves every December. Party City, for example, will open 50 pop-up toy shops for the holidays. Target will have more store space for toys . It’s just especially amusing that Amazon, having helped kill off these physical retailers, is trying to learn from them to make even mor
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazon’s plans for a New York office are under new scrutiny

By
A month ago, when Amazon announced that it would build regional offices in New York and Virginia at great expense to the taxpayers there, I wrote that it had misunderstood the moment : Perhaps the furor over Amazon’s regional offices will blow over. But it’s hard not to feel today as if the company misread the room — overestimating the public’s appetite for a billion-dollar giveaway to one of the world’s biggest companies, and underestimating the public’s ability to raise hell on- and offline. Amazon may yet feel that pain, in the long run. Today, Amazon met the room: 150 protesters who showed up to the first New York City Council hearing about the plan. According to reports from the scene, demonstrators’ concerns start with the $3 billion in incentives that New York plans to give Amazon in exchange for locating there — and, it says, creating 25,000 jobs. Here’s Leticia Miranda in BuzzFeed : ”You’re worth a trillion dollars,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson told the
Post a Comment
Read more