Can Smart Home Integration Drive the Social Care Robot Market?

The past eighteen months have been hard on personal/social care robots and their proponents. A spate of startups shut down despite the potential for robots to support a wider range of services in the smart home. Typically, these devices have been delivered without an eye to wider smart home integration. However, Amazon and Google appear to be preparing their own home robots, which in all likelihood will offer personal/social care functionality. These players will build on their successful entry into the smart home market and likely look to any robot offering to build on and extend those capabilities. What should we expect from these players, and can they succeed where others have failed?

Personal/social care robots offer the potential for a range of services that ultimately could include complex, multifunctional personal robots but currently describes very simple, stationary personal robots that are barely articulated but do offer some physical interaction through moving to face users, taking photos and videos of groups of people, and providing some character while communicating with users. The category plays second fiddle to home care robots, which have primarily gained traction with robot floor cleaners and lawn movers.

The key value of personal/social care robots is the interaction they support. Early exponents have suffered:

• Jibo finally shut down server support for its eponymously named social robot for the home in 2019, but folded its business in 2018. The privately-held, Boston-based startup was the poster child for the category, with a smart speaker sized device that offered some motorized movement capabilities to deliver feedback to users as it used Natural Language Understanding (NLU) along with speech and facial recognition to recognize and interact with end users.
• San Francisco-based Anki shut down in April 2019. The company’s three product offerings—the Cozmo, Overdrive and Vector—all offered small, interactive, toy-type devices with price points in the low hundreds of dollars. The high-end Vector device leveraged robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver small, palm-sized, voice activated devices that included self-charging, a camera, a microphone, a speaker, and support for Alexa integration.
• Mayfield Robotics ended its home companion efforts in mid-2018 when it ceased operations, having failed to raise any further investment in efforts to bring its Kuri device to market. Mayfield had hoped to move from participation in the Bosch Startup Platform program and into existing Bosch business units, but Bosch could not find a business fit to support the business.
• Startup TickTock, which had worked to bring consumer robots into the smart home, folded in 2018. It’s co-founder Ryan Hickman, who founded the Google Cloud Robotics team in 2010, returned to Google in a role he described on his LinkedIn profile as “Heading up product and operations on a new robotics effort within Google Brain."

Meanwhile, other players such as Temi and Rokid have increasingly adapted their focuses to appeal to the enterprise rather than the home market.

Both Amazon and Google have proven their ability to develop and succeed in technology markets where others have not had the resources or the vision they can bring to the table. Both players have driven their voice control devices and platforms into the heart of the smart home market. Amazon has already pushed into the commercial robot space, but Google’s initial robotics push at the start of the decade led nowhere.

What is key to their potential in social robotics is the AI and voice recognition at the heart of their already popular Alexa and Assistant platforms. While both Amazon and Google have proven the value of their voice control and supporting AI has the resources to deliver effective systems, earlier startups were hard pressed to come close to the resources or data mining available to the two tech giants.  Meanwhile, Echo and Google Home devices increasingly support screens and cameras in addition to microphone arrays, providing the resources to support facial recognition alongside existing voice recognition as key features to underpin more personalized interactions between users and their devices. The Alexa and Assistant platforms already offer a control point for a range of smart home devices and platforms. Adding a more personalized interaction through a personal/social robot is not a significant step.

What is lacking in current voice control offerings from both companies is articulation within the devices that would enable them to move and face home users. Adding this would mean greater device complexity and higher device costs for consumers. Some reports have Amazon’s ongoing project looking to develop a mobile robot capable of moving from room to room. While this adds the ability of a mobile Alexa device that moves from room to room as required, ABI Research believes, at least in its first iterations, that a simpler device that extends the functionality of the Echo would be a more robust initial entry point.

Even so, there are two primary questions facing an Amazon or Google home robot:

• What is the additional value in offering robots in the current market? Voice control has enabled both companies and others to gain valuable positions with their customers. The data stream from voice control platforms enable consumers to be offered better targeted services, items for purchase, and advertising. Adding robotic functionality brings additional device cost in a market where subsidized pricing has helped drive adoption. Furthermore, adding robotic functionality may not bring immediate additional value to the customer relationship for these companies.
• How appealing is a robotic device from these players likely to be for consumers? Both players, as well as many other tech giants, face increased governmental and public scrutiny over the data they collect and the way the value of that data is distributed. Voice control alone has been at the heart of many data management and privacy concerns relating to personal data collected by devices inside consumer homes. Adding facial recognition and the ability to move around a home is only likely to further these concerns and dampen consumer enthusiasm.

There is an area in which the advantages of adding robotics to voice control devices might yet be clearer. The ablity for devices to move to confirm when they are listening or being invoked could help in aging in place or Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications. We have written in detail about the potential for smart home technology to be the foundation for a new generation of aging in place applications. Voice control could be at the heart of that rollout, just as it has pushed into the smart home domain. There are already some cases of Alexa devices being leveraged to provide companionship in retirement homes. Adding robotic functions to these devices to show activation and engagement through physical movement or simulated facial expressions provides a format far better suited to AAL than existing voice control devices. In addition, the ability for such a device to also support control for key devices in the home, such as a video doorbell, smart locks, thermostats, and more, would appeal to the AAL market.

AAL-targeted robotic devices such as the ElliQ from Intuition Robotics or Buddy from Blue Frog Robotics have already started to target the AAL market with devices that can integrate with smart home systems. However, the long-standing economic and structural issues that have held AAL adoption back are unlikely to be tackled and conquered by these and similar players alone even if extended into robotics. The heft that Google and Amazon can bring to the market can clearly outweigh those already in the market. It remains to be seen just how committed and ambitious either player is.