- General
- July 14, 2019
- 8 minutes read
Amazon Reportedly Working On Alexa Robot
Amazon Tap, a portable Alexa-enabled Bluetooth speaker image: Amazon According to a recent report from Bloomberg, Amazon is working on a…
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| Amazon Tap, a portable Alexa-enabled Bluetooth speaker
image: Amazon
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According to a recent report from Bloomberg, Amazon is working on a wheeled robot that can be controlled by Alexa commands, alongside a new Echo Speaker. Bloomberg reports both devices are being developed at Amazon Lab126, an R&D team based in Sunnyvale, California. The report says Amazon originally planned to unveil the robot as early as this year but hasn’t yet gotten to a point of mass production readiness for the machine.
Although Amazon could choose to axe the project, Bloomberg reports the company has courted engineers from other projects to work on it — an indication the company plans to sell it at some point. It remains unclear what tasks the robot may be used for. Bloomberg reports [citing unnamed people familiar with the project] prototypes that are about waist-high and move around with the help of several computer-vision cameras. An Amazon engineer was said to have summoned the machine with his voice at an internal demonstration.
Amazon has not made any public statement on the robot, said to be codenamed “Vesta”, but a clue can be traced to a last year Instagram post by CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos shared a picture of an Alexa device taped to an iRobot vacuum. “What?!!!!” he penned. “Found this in the living room when I got home. I have no idea. #LifeWithFourKids.”
