The same approach to teaching Astro with gestures and words could be extended to all kinds of furniture and objects in a home in the future, Washington says. The underlying AI technology can also help the robot understand what humans are doing. “Artificial intelligence has reached this amazing inflection point,” he says. “It’s completely at your fingertips to know ‘This is a chair’ and ‘There’s someone in a chair.’” Amazon is also planning a software update this year that will allow Astro to identify cats and dogs and automatically record videos of them. a feature users had been asking for.
Washington says the technology behind those new capabilities is part of Amazon’s “big vision” of the smart home, which involves learning to anticipate people’s habits. Amazon executives call this “ambient intelligence.” To get there, Amazon needs to be able to understand many of the things someone does at home, Washington says, but most people wouldn’t see a camera in every room. A cute robot on wheels provides a more acceptable way to monitor a household’s activity. “If you have a mobile robot, it could be this smart glue for this vision of the future,” Washington says. “When you walk into a room, for example, the lights come on.”
When I ask Washington whether it could involve predicting what people might want or need to buy, he evades a direct answer. He does say that the robot needs to know if you’ve added things to a shopping list, and points out how Alexa can preemptively turn off the lights when you tell it goodnight, using a feature known as Hunches. “Today you have to ask things,” he says. “But a lot of these questions are starting to fade into the background as the AI gets so good that it starts predicting what I would like.”
Amazon’s vision of an adorable machine watching your every move might be unsettling to some, especially given the company’s already detailed look at customers’ lives. Washington says Astro currently does nearly all of its computing on its own hardware, sending little to Amazon’s servers other than a map of people’s homes to be forwarded to the Astro smartphone app. “We opted for a privacy by design approach,” he says.
WIRED saw Astro in action last week in a mock apartment in Lab126. After years of writing about robots, I was impressed by its ability to quickly navigate doorways and around obstacles, as well as its subtle interface with blinking eyes and emotional beeps. It was clear that to make even a relatively limited home robot, Amazon had to cram in some impressive technology. Astro orients itself using cameras, motion sensors and smart software that converts video images into a map, something that is difficult to do reliably in a small and relatively cheap consumer device.
The overall impression is more of an intelligent pet than a machine trying to appear human – sensible given the robot’s limitations. But there was the occasional awkward moment when I asked Amazon executives, “Can it do anything else?” Washington and others I spoke to at Lab126 said early Astro users typically like the robot but want it to do more.
Amazon hopes to solve that problem by keeping Astro on the market and steadily upgrading the robot until great applications appear.
One option is elderly care. Washington says an early Astro user logged into the robot to check on an elderly parent and found they had fallen out of their wheelchair. In the future, Astro could watch for such accidents and do many other useful tasks automatically, Washington says. “It can know when they took their medicine and tell you if they fell and needed help,” he says.
