Jibo: The Family-Friendly, Dancing Smart Home Assistant

With voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home becoming more popular by the day, the smart home tech industry has been growing fast.  So, it was only a matter of time until startups started pitching fun, new takes on these devices.  That’s where the Jibo family assistant comes in.Jibo

According to a recent CNET article, Jibo is “an 11-inch-tall countertop robot: A family assistant that can distinguish between different voices and faces, with an adorable personality to boot” (Carey).  In general, this device is created specifically with families in mind, as it could engage with children with witty banter and even dance on its swivel base.  Additionally, it could perform other interesting functions, such as controlling other smart home devices, taking pictures, and even turning to face the source of a motion or sound.  However, the device is not perfect, as it is currently priced at $899 and is lacking a few basic smart assistant functions (which it will be updated to include in the future), causing the author to state “that’s a hefty price for a home assistant that can’t yet play music. Or make calls. Or set reminders” (Carey).

Overall, I feel the Jibo is an interesting and exciting take on the conventional smart home assistant, and after the promised software updates, I think it could definitely be a hit product with families in the future.  What do you think about this device?  Will it be successful?  Leave a comment below.

 

Carey, Bridget. “This Super-Cute Robot Wants to Join Your Family.” CNET, CNET, 25 Oct. 2017, www.cnet.com/news/jibo-social-robot-price-launch-899-nov-7/.

Image: https://image.slidesharecdn.com/jibo-150410055608-conversion-gate01/95/jibo-2-638.jpg?cb=1444597475

One thought on “Jibo: The Family-Friendly, Dancing Smart Home Assistant

  1. It seems like it would be so much fun to have an AI like Jibo at home to play with us and be our family assistant. After reading this article, I can even imagine what it will be like with Jibo at home. But other than these good thing Jibo can bring us, I am more concern about the bad thing that would happen to me with Jibo. As what we saw in class, a self-driving car was hacked easily and lost control by its driver. I am pretty sure that the same thing would happen to Jibo. As a family assistant in my house, Jibo knows my daily routine and the structure really well. It is scary that some unknown hacker would just hack into Jibo and see what I would do every day, what the location my house is, and what thing did I put at which room of my house. To make things worse, Jibo can also video while walking through my house and send it to someone else. It can even murder me under other people’s control. If we put the hackers aside, there’s also a saying that AI would finally have their own thoughts and take place of human being. Maybe people invent AIs for the good of human, but nobody knows what will happen in the future when AI technology become so mature. I have to say that I really like the idea of Jibo, but I will never ever have one in my house.

    Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-barrat/hawking-gates-artificial-intelligence_b_7008706.html

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