Amazon announces Astro, a home robot it swears by, more than Alexa

“Customers just don’t want Alexa on wheels,” Dave Limp, head of Amazon’s devices, said at a company event Tuesday. Then he started promoting a tech-packed home robot that looked a lot like the wheeled Alexa.

At least four years in the making, the little robot named Astro has a big screen and cameras attached to a wheeled base and can walk around a house. It was part of the company’s annual devices event, where Amazon unveiled a number of products, including a smart thermostat, upgrades to the Echo line, and a children’s device for interactive video messaging.

Of all the products it showed, Amazon was most excited for Astro, which was shown as the finale. And from the very beginning, the company tried to sort out the differences between Astro and Alexa, the company’s digital assistant. Amazon said Astro’s big eyes on the screen and the different hues it emits give the machine a “unique personality”. (At a starting price of $1,000, the Astro is much more expensive than most Alexa-enabled devices.)

But the main uses Amazon offered seemed to reflect some of the capabilities of Alexa and its related products, which already put audio and camera surveillance in different rooms of a home. It’s moving though, and Mr. Limp said customers can send the robot to check on people and different pets – for example, by raising a camera on a telescopic arm to see if the flame on a stove is still on.

“Or if you’re on a video call, Astro will walk around the house with you so you can keep talking,” he said. In a promotional video, a boy crawled along the floor at the height of the main camera as the robot followed him. Extendable arm can reach height 42 inches, meaning that its camera will follow an adult roughly around the person’s midsection.

Mr. Limp said Amazon is building an “entirely new tech fabric” for the device for navigating a home, with several tech experts discussing the challenge of locating and mapping several areas in a home at once. The Astro didn’t seem to be able to navigate the stairs, though, like a Roomba, it stopped before rolling down the stairs.

The company offers customers “1. Day Editions” said they can request invitations to be part of their pilot program and will begin issuing invitations at an unspecified time this year.

“Does anyone in the room think there will be no robots in your home in five, 10 years?” said Charlie Tritschler, vice president of Amazon. We talked about it,” he said. presentation. “Everyone was like, ‘Yeah, we are.