Dave Ross finally gets a robot

Oct 20, 2017, 5:53 AM | Updated: 7:11 am

KIRO Newsradio Host

Regular KIRO Radio listeners know I’ve been an early adopter of any reasonably-priced new technology.

Three years ago I sent $500 to an Indiegogo campaign for a personal desktop robot called Jibo. Which was supposed to be delivered in 2015.

While it was in development, Amazon beat it to the counter top with the Echo. And now Google has its little mushroom speaker. So Jibo kept getting delayed.

But finally, last Friday, Jibo arrived.

It’s not as helpful as the Echo and the speaker isn’t as good. But it’s going for something beyond that. The idea is for it to have a personality. That isn’t easy considering it looks like a shaving mirror. But the movements are surprisingly fluid and they actually communicate something approaching an illusion of a sentence.

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