Amazon’s Astro home robot was introduced at the company’s fall Devices & Services event two years ago. Last year, Astro’s name was mentioned no less than 25 times during the annual event. This year: zero mentions.
Combined with the earlier departure of Amazon’s VP of consumer robotics, Ken Washington, the absence of the 17-inch tall Alexa-enabled robot earlier this week left us wondering if Astro (or at least the project) was still alive.
“As we mentioned when we announced Astro, this will be a long journey,” an Amazon spokesperson said in response to GeekWire’s inquiry earlier this week.
The statement continued, “We’re committed to bringing more features to Astro that make it even more helpful in the home. As you heard [Wednesday], generative AI and LLM technologies together present an exciting opportunity for us across Amazon, and this includes Astro. We think Astro’s future is bright.”
Much of Amazon’s focus was, in fact, on AI during the event at its HQ2 in Virginia earlier this week. New features previewed by the company included a new Alexa capability called Let’s Chat, which opens a dedicated chat session that — based on the demo, at least — feels like a voice-enabled conversation with ChatGPT.
One of Amazon’s points was that it’s much more challenging to make this type of AI chat work in the context of voice in the home, given the need for faster response times, and zero tolerance for AI hallucinations when turning off a light bulb, setting a timer, or adding an item to a shopping list for example.
Add a rolling robot to the mix, and it might get tougher, and maybe cooler.
For the record, Astro is still listed on the Amazon website, under the Day 1 editions preview program, for a price of $1,599. According to the listing, the it’s still available in limited quantities on an invite-only basis.
Washington, whom we got to know last year at Amazon re:MARS and the GeekWire Summit, has started a new job as senior vice president and senior technology and product officer at medical device company Medtronic.
Of course, this journalistic game of “what’s missing” is ultimately an imperfect exercise, but sometimes what a company doesn’t say or do can be as just as telling as what it actually says and does.
Speaking of which, where was the Kindle Scribe? OK, we’re done now.
