Meet Jibo, the robot that wants to be part of your family.
Some two decades in the making, Jibo comes from Cynthia Breazeal of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory and is intended to help out a family by acting as a messenger, performing various tasks and even being a pal, the New York Times reported.
Standing about a foot tall, Jibo weighs 6 pounds, has wireless connection and communicates through an LCD screen that can smoothly swivel all the way around. The robot is currently an Indiegogo project and has brought in more than $75,500 of a $100,000 goal with 31 days left.
Still in the prototype phase, Jibo will purportedly be able to provide alerts, take photos at events, record video and act as a go-between for remotely communicating with friends and family. Besides all that, Jibo has a "personality" shown by its round "face," a 5.7-inch screen that brings the robot to life, Mashable reported.
"It's really important for technology to be humanized," said Breazeal, as quoted by the Times. "The next stage in computing, the next wave, is emotion."
The robot is composed of off-the-shelf parts and will cost $499 for Indiegogo donors and $599 for the developer version with a software development kit.
Jibo is designed in a way that circumvents the "uncanny valley" space people find horrifying, but it still exhibits curiously human qualities.
Mashable described how during the interview, Breazeal mentioned the robot's name, after which it "woke up" from a sleep mode and began making quiet sounds.
"Autonomous robots sends these signals of what psychology calls animacy," Breazeal described. "In the world of entities, our minds have different ways, different psychology when you think of things that are governed by having states of mind and things that are governed by the laws of physics."
While the current Jibo model is a prototype, Breazeal plans to add a greater range of functionality as shown in the robot's promotional video.
See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?
