Amazon Tuesday announced its much-hyped new home robot, called Astro. Amazon's home robot will retail for $999.
It's worth noting that the Astro home robot is a "Day 1 Edition" product, meaning 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 way, Amazon won't have to mass-produce the product if there isn't a lot of demand.
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Amazon said Astro will be released later this year, but did not give a specific date.
According to Charlie Tritschler , the company decided to create this home robot because it believes that in a few years, the use of robots will be commonplace anyway.
Tritschler said Astro brings together a lot of what Amazon already offers in other products.
In fact, the company wanted to combine various of its technologies, such as the robots it uses in its factories and warehouses, Amazon Prime Video, Alexa , and home monitoring.
So what is Amazon 's Astro home robot ?
Astro is about the size of a small dog. It moves around the house on three wheels, two large and one smaller, which allows it to rotate. It has a camera that allows the Astro home robot to monitor the house when you are away. It can follow you and play music or show TV shows on its 10-inch touchscreen. It can also recognize faces (if you want). So you can ask it to carry something (e.g. a soft drink placed in the storage compartment in the back) to a specific person in another room.
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As Tritschler said, the Astro home robot combines many elements from other Amazon gadgets. The cameras can be used for home security or for video chat, combining Amazon's Ring cameras with Echo Show smart displays. You can talk to Astro like you would an Echo device or Alexa. You can also watch movies or TV shows like you would on an Amazon tablet or Fire TV.
One of the most important and useful elements of Amazon's home robot is that it can be controlled remotely from an app on the phone.
But Astro doesn't have arms, so it can't lift things. also can't go up or down stairs, so it's only good for single-story homes.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if it could do more? It could have a hand that picks things up off the floor or tidy up or bring you drinks. But looking at the technologies, the cost and complexity of those technologies today, but also the reliability at the consumer level, it wasn’t easy to do that,” Tritschler told CNBC. “And we realized that this is a journey, we don’t have to do everything in the first product. So we focused on mobility, intelligent motion, visual ID and some of the other really tough challenges that we had to overcome.”
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Is the Amazon Astro home robot really worth it, considering its price and also the fact that it does things that other products also offer? It might be considered useful in several cases, especially for people who want to monitor their loved ones who live alone.
Tritschler said that this is just the first robot and that Amazon has a lot of ideas on how to improve it. Who knows? In a few years, the Astro home robot could be in many homes.
Source: CNBC
