This week, Toyota revealed its Kirobo Mini robot. Clocking in at all of 10 centimetres in height, the little robot seems a marked departure from what the Japanese car manufacturer is most known for. It begs the questions: what exactly is the Kirobo Mini for, and why is Toyota building it?
Toyota says that the little robot is a conversation partner and a stepping-stone in its AI and robotics push. The company has invested heavily in both areas during the last 12 months.
My take is that Kirobo Mini is, at best, a quite clever marketing ploy, and at worst, a huge liability that could land Toyota in all sorts of difficulties.
Up in the cloud
Pre-orders for the Kirobo Mini will start later in 2016, with shipping set to start in 2017. Toyota plans to start selling the robot through car dealers in the Tokyo area, as well as its home prefecture, Aichi. It will gradually be made available in the rest of Japan, and there are currently no plans to sell it elsewhere. The robot comes equipped with cameras, speakers and Bluetooth. It will supposedly recognize a person’s facial expressions and determine what mood they are in, but won’t be able to tell individuals apart, through facial recognition or other similar technologies.
So what’s the selling point here? Its conversation capabilities are the most important feature.
According to PC World, its conversation system works as follows: audio being picked up by the Kirobo are sent to a companion application on a smartphone. From there, the audio is sent to a cloud system run by Toyota. The cloud system helps determine what is being said and how the robot should respond. A Kirobo Mini will cost ¥39,800 ($392), as well as a monthly fee of ¥300 ($3) for the Toyota cloud service.
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Robot for the lonely?
What the Kirobo robot is actually for depends on whom you ask.
Reuters reported that it was for Japan’s lonely, elderly and childless. The robot is “designed as a synthetic baby companion in Japan, where plummeting birth rates have left many women childless.” Children were also mentioned as a possible target audience. Whether that is Toyota’s official stance or Reuters’ interpretation is a bit uncertain.
At any rate, the Kirobo Mini is supposed to act primarily as a conversation partner.
Fuminori Kataoka, Toyota’s chief design engineer on the Kirobo Mini project, highlighted how the robot is meant to create an emotional connection with users through childlike traits such as wobbling and speaking with a babyish, high-pitched voice.
Kataoka also underlined that the robot is a stepping-stone for Toyota, which is investing heavily in robot and AI capabilities. Towards the end of 2015, the company invested $1 billion over five years in a robotics and AI R&D lab in Silicon Valley. By April, Toyota had announced the openings of two further research AI and robotics centers in the U.S. and have announced plans to develop technology for autonomous cars, as well as robotics for elder care. The Kirobo Mini’s purpose seems to fit in neatly with the latter.
