A robot with personality: Anki's Cozmo mixes humour, animation and AI

Palm-size toy robot, due in October, will recognize faces, play games, express a range of emotions

If you grew up watching movies like Star Wars, Short Circuit or WALL-E, you’ve probably daydreamed of what it’d be like to have a robot sidekick, a machine that genuinely reacts to you, recognizes you and talks back.

The team at Anki, a San Francisco startup known for smartphone-controlled toy race cars, had the same dream. Their new product isn’t a car, it’s a friendly robot named Cozmo.

SMALL WONDER

• Cozmo can recognize faces, play games & express emotions
• Moves around on tank-style tracks
• Has built-in speakers, which play a soundtrack of music

“The reason we love the robots we see in movies so much is because they don’t just respond with the same canned responses, they surprise you,” says Hanns Tappeiner, Anki’s president and co-founder. “It’s taken years but our technology is finally to a point where we can build a robot with personality — and bring some of the things you see in the movies to real life.”

Cozmo is cute and palm-sized, and looks a bit like a dump truck with an old tube TV for a head. It moves around on tank-style tracks, and has built-in speakers which play a soundtrack of music that changes based on Cozmo’s “emotions” at the time. Anki designed its endearingly goofy moves using the same animation software filmmakers use, only now the action plays out in real life.

In a demo at Anki’s office, I tapped my fingers in front of a Cozmo prototype and it playfully snapped its forklift-style arm at me. When the robot spotted my face, an app prompted me to type in my name. After I did, Cozmo said “Nathan” in a voice that sounded a bit like Pixar’s WALL-E. (Not coincidentally, Anki’s character director, Carlos Baena, used to work at Pixar on films like WALL-E, Cars and The Incredibles.)

“He’ll say your name differently every time, with the tone of his voice or how he moves,” Mr Tappeiner said.

I played a few games with Cozmo, all of which involved ice-cube sized blocks. First, it stacked them, eyes squinted with focus. When it was finished, it nodded its head slightly with pride. But when I put another block on top that Cozmo couldn’t reach, it grunted in frustration and knocked the stack down.

Using Cozmo’s app, which will be available for the iPhone, iPad and Android, I chose a new game. We each had to tap a color-changing block when our two blocks were the same color. On easy mode, I beat Cozmo four out of five times. When I set the difficulty to hard, Cozmo beat me every time—this little robot is fast when it wants to be.

Cozmo’s smarts and gameplay are reminiscent of Anki’s Overdrive toy race cars, which let users unlock new characters and attributes as they race. Like Overdrive cars, Cozmo has on-board sensors, but its brains are in the smartphone or tablet used for gameplay. The software in the app includes Cozmo’s “emotion engine,” some artificial intelligence to handle decision making and computer vision that lets Cozmo know where it’s at in relation to other objects.

Those emotions are key to Cozmo’s appeal. When it recognizes a new person, Cozmo is social and curious. When ignored, it gets sad or plays on its own. It’s frustrated when it loses games, and celebrates when it wins.

“Cozmo never gives you the same reaction twice,” Mr. Tappeiner said. “The head movement, the arm movement, the ways his eyes animate on his face, or the inflection of his voice—the combinations change to create personality.”

Once, when I pushed it over, it flipped itself back up, then gave me a look like, “Why did you do that?” When it’s on its cradle, it sometimes snores.

Mr. Tappeiner says Anki will add more games and even more emotional reaction by the time Cozmo goes on sale for $180 in October. (You can preorder it on anki.com starting Monday.) Down the road, Anki intends to develop story-based games and even give Cozmo a few friends.

Although comparison to WALL-E is obvious, it’s hard not to compare Cozmo to another recent favorite, BB-8, star of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Sphero launched an iPhone-controlled version of BB-8 last winter, but while its motions and quirky mannerisms were spot on with the film character, Sphero’s toy doesn’t have sensors, and can’t do much to interact with its surroundings, aside from pretending to watch its own movie.

Cozmo needs more content so the novelty doesn’t wear off. And while Cozmo can’t say much more than my name, other toys are starting to carry on conversations. But already Anki is taking toy robots to a new level, where they act, and even think, much more like their Hollywood counterparts.

Source: The Wall Street Journal