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Tidy profit, even on the Lite version.
Edit: Curious to know what someone downed this for. Even from a sketchy CGI video you can see the head moves on four struts. You can do a cardboard DIY on an ESP32 for $10. Consumer robotics with sloppy tolerances are dirt cheap and I see no reason why this doesn't fit that remit.
The robot mostly looks like a very basic alternative to the Lego robotics offerings (mindstorms/technic/spike). And, they are in more or less the same price range as well Not sure what huggingface is going for here. Seems like a big distraction for the company
I love huggingface and they've done a lot for the industry ...But... I'm so confused by the economics, and not in a general way. I'm a mobile developer by trade, and AFAICT from dipping my toe in the water of servers, file downloads are on the order of $0.01/GB, and cheapest you'll get publicly is maybe $0.04/GB. But they never ever charge and regularly have people downloading tens of gigabytes. That's the cost side…
There is a variety of income sources, including inference and Hub Pro and enterprise subscriptions [1].
Nothing in the article, the video, or the manufacturer's own blog post explains what this thing actually does . Seriously. This is an ephemeral marketing puff piece. As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.
https://anki.bot/products/vector-robot
The little robot was heavily inspired by Wall-E. He'll play around when he's bored. If you play music, he'll dance. And, at least for a while, they had Alexa baked in so you could "ask" Vector to do all the things Alexa does like playing music or turning off the lights.
Vector wasn't without flaws. The Alexa integration was a tad janky. And while Vector was pretty good at detecting his environment, his sensors would occasionally fail and he'd roll off the end of the desk and hit the floor. For me, this damaged the screen which made impossible to read the codes from the device necessary to sync it with services.
But there was enough there that worked to really get the vision across. After playing with Vector for a while, I believe the first in-home robot to see major success will be more of pet and less of a helper. Vector's playful personality was a key thing that made him unique. I believe that there are not technological challenges left to solve to build an amazing consumer product - it's just a matter of putting all the right pieces together to build something crazy appealing.
The blog post has actual details, but I’m even more confused after reading it: https://huggingface.co/blog/reachy-mini The “disrupt the robot industry” is an insane lie from Venture Beat. They clearly okay with lying if they know it will drive traffic. As best I can tell, this is meant to be a little humanoid style desk toy to act as the interface for communication. It can move its head, wiggle antennas, and rotate,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry” This has everything to do with disruptive innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen, where a new product enters the marketplace "at the bottom", with fewer and/or lower quality features but at a significantly lower cost, and then (if successful) gradually improves the feature set and quality until it displaces incumbents "Gradually and then suddenly".
a $300 alexa-like is at the bottom of the market?
But if you think of it as a basic and open AI-integrated robot kit to be used in the home, then it's quite cheap. The closest competitor I see is the MISTY II, which is more fully-featured but starts at $3,995 [0].
Maybe disruption is not quite the right word as there are no incumbents in home robotics yet, but I expect that this space will explode next decade, and getting $299/$449 devices into hobbyist homes seems to me like a great play by Hugging Face.
Please don't put "robots" with cameras and Wi-Fi inside kids' rooms.
If it can play Spotify using voice commands I’d buy it to replace my Apple HomePod.