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| Amazon home robot |
Amazon on Tuesday announced its long-rumored home
robot. It's called Astro and will sell for $999. CNBC
reporter had a chance to check it out in a demo with Amazon last week and
wanted to share a few thoughts on what Astro is, what it can and can't do, and
why Amazon decided to build a home robot. that being said, below is how it works,
Astro seems like a
strange gadget for Amazon to launch. The company is best known as an online
store. And most of its operating profit comes from its AWScloud business.
Notably, Astro is
a "Day 1 Edition" product, which means it won't be sold to everyone
at first. Instead, Amazon will ask people to sign up and then invite them to
order the robot. That allows Amazon to avoid building too many gadgets it won't
sell and a public flop like the Amazon
Fire Phone, which was discontinued in 2015.
Amazon said Astro will go on sale later this year but did not give a specific launch date. It's worth noting that Amazon has made similar promises about future products that either never launched or were severely delayed.
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| Amazon home robot |
So, why robots?
"We get together every once in a while, and we organize a senior team meeting around: 'What are some of the changes in technology?'"
Amazon's vice president of product Charlie
Tritschler told me. "And we talked about AI and processors getting more
powerful, and inevitably robotics came up. And one of the discussions was:
'Does anyone here in this meeting think that in 5-10 years there won't be more
robots in your home?' And everyone was like, 'Well, yeah, of course.' It's
like, 'Well, then, let's get going.'"
Tritschler said Astro
brings together a lot of what Amazon already offers in other products.
"We've got a
decade-plus with what we've done in fulfillment centers" — with the
company's industrial robots that cart products through its warehouses —
"but then all of the things we've done in devices and Amazon Prime Video
and Alexa and home monitoring, and we had so many things we could pull
together," Tritschler said.
That's a good representation of what I saw in the demo.
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| Amazon home robot |
What is Astro?
Astro
is about the size of a small dog. It roams around your house on three wheels,
including two big ones that prevent it from getting stuck and a smaller one for
rotating. It has a camera that rises up on a 42-inch arm that can keep an eye
on your home as Astro patrols while you're away. It can follow you around and
play music or display TV shows on its 10-inch touchscreen. It can recognize
faces — if you want it to — so you can load up two sodas in the back storage
compartment and tell Astro to take them to someone in the living room.
Astro is like a combo of lots of Amazon's other gadgets placed on wheels. The cameras can be used for home security or for video chat, sort of combining Amazon's Ring cameras with its Echo Show smart screens. The cameras are also used to create a map of your house when you set Astro up for the first time.
You can talk to Astro much like you'd talk to an Echo or Alexa — you can change
the name to Alexa if you want — to get sports scores or the weather. And you
can play movies or TV shows like you would on an Amazon tablet or Fire TV.
