The new educational tech comes in the form of a seven-pound robot which looks like something ripped from a Pixar film.
An adorable educational robot, Moxie is designed to teach children at home. But it’s expensive: the robot itself is $1,500, and after the first year, it requires a monthly subscription of $60.
The robotics and AI company behind Moxie, embodied, says the robot will teach children aged six to nine with weekly themes and lessons designed to facilitate cognitive, emotional , and social learning.
Kids will have the challenge of helping Moxie discover and develop human experiences and life skills, such as learning new vocabulary or talking about vital things such as going to the dentist. Parents will be able to use a “parent app” to control Moxie, which will allow them to check the progress of their child and limit their use of Moxie. Privacy and security issues have been a huge problem when it comes to making children’s education software and Moxie is unlikely to be an exception. Embodied creator Paolo Pirjanian said during an interview with Fast Company that Moxie ‘s data would be encrypted, with parents or guardians being the only people allowed to access the data for their specific device.
But Moxie also has plenty of software to use to communicate with and track others nearby: it has four microphones within its mouth, and a front camera. Other children’s tech, such as a smart Barbie and an attempted smart kids speaker, have been running into controversy because of the privacy implications of building microphones into children’s toys.
In recent years, several companies have sought to make friendly robots to interact with at home. There’s Aibo, the $2,900 robotic pet from Sony, plus Jibo, a family robot that was successfully crowdfunded just to flop into its life span a few years.
Sometime this fall, Moxie is slated to be released.
Fast Company has dived deeply into the production process behind the name of Embodied.
