Moxie, the $800 AI Robot Companion for Children, Faces Shutdown as Embodied Inc. Collapses

Moxie's $799 Robot Companion for Children Is Going to Die

The blight of internet-connected devices continues as Moxie, a cute AI-powered robot for children, is being killed. The company behind it, Embodied, explained on an FAQ page that an expected funding round fell through at the last minute, and it can no longer afford to remain in business. We all know by now the frustration caused when devices that require cloud connectivity lose support from their manufacturers. Customers often end up with a bricked device or one that is severely neutered as core features stop working. This story is made sadder because the Moxie is aimed at children ages 5 to 10 years old and is specifically marketed as a trusted companion for them to discuss their interests and emotions. It can also play games, teach educational lessons, and tell stories. Well, it could until nowâ€"Embodied says "Moxie relies on cloud connectivity for its core features, and it will not function once services end" which could happen any day now. We already have seen evidence that impressionable children are able to suspend disbelief and lean on AI chatbots for emotional support and adviceâ€"sometimes to a dangerous degree. Parents will now have to explain to children who may have developed a bond with their Moxie's why they are going to stop working. Because Embedded was nearing a new round of funding but the lead investor "withdrew leaving us with no viable options to continue operations." Try explaining that to a 7-year-old. To add insult to injury, buyers of the Moxieâ€"which cost a whopping $799â€"won't be receiving a refund either. Startups require a fierce determination and blinding confidence that things will work out, and stories are aplenty of founders white-knuckling it, narrowly avoiding death at every turn. But the consequence here is that Embodied apparently spent every last penny it had without a plan B in the event this supposed funding round didn't come through. It did not save enough rainy day money to offer refunds to customers. There remains a lot of debate over the use of AI bots to combat loneliness and replicate friendships; the research is still nascent. While they do have a lot of characteristics that people seek in friendships, like being supportive, there is some concern that they will be used as a replacement for real friendships among people who are the most isolated. Chatbots are very agreeable. That's not necessarily going to teach children to become a well-adjusted person. And there have been multiple instances of adolescents receiving alarming and dangerous advice from chatbots. Embodied said Moxie utilized AI trained by child development experts to increase empathy, rather than a more general AI model. Embodied has raised $19 million to date since 2016, according to PitchBook. But hardware is a tough business, and many startups have flamed out over the years trying to make it. Developing and iterating consumer hardware is much more difficult than building an app. And there's an economy of scale required for these types of companies to become profitable. $800 for a kid's toy is surely a big ask for most parents. The hardware landscape is riddled with flameouts, from Pebble to Jawboneâ€"and newer companies like Humane and Rabbit don't seem to be doing too well. Humane recently cut the price of its AI Pin with sales reported in the low tens of thousands and returns skyrocketing as buyers found the device had poor performance and didn't include promised features. The company has raised a quarter of a billion dollars in funding.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Moxie maker Embodied is going under, teaching important lessons about cloud services Comment The maker of Moxie, an "AI"-powered educational robot for kids, is going out of business - and the $800 bots will die with it. Embodied Inc. made the Moxie Robot, which is a cloud-connected interactive robot intended to be a friendly educational tool for small children. The snag is that its maker has encountered what it calls "financial challenges" and is closing down: So, another little pop in what an increasing number of commentators, from Ed Zitron earlier this month to Cory Doctorow a year ago, see as the looming collapse of the AI bubble. Youtube Video The problem is that the robots are not just cloud-connected, they're entirely cloud-driven. When the company closes down, the robots will all shut off too. We don't know how many Moxies were sold - not enough, apparently - but it looks like there will be more heartbroken kids when their "plastic pal who's fun to be with" suddenly drops dead. This was eminently foreseeable. Indeed, CEO Paolo Pirjanian, formerly CTO at iRobot - no longer to be an Amazon subsidiary - did foresee it, and planned for it. The Register quoted him in 2007, when he said: You can certainly see why you'd want your products to be as indispensable as your internet connection, but making them dependent on an internet connection, and of course for there to be live servers for them to connect to, seems to us to display less foresight. It's not the first deliberately cute internet-connected gizmo to stop working, of course. Remember the Nabaztag light-up bunny? The year before The Reg quoted Pirjanian, we noted they were competition prizes. The servers were shut down in 2010 and the bunnies died. (They were hacked and brought back to life in 2018, and subsequently relaunched.) The thing is, though, that the Nabaztag was, or is, a harmless amusing gadget for grownups. Embodied's devices were specifically designed to appeal to children aged five to ten, and to get those children to bond with them. Especially kids with social anxiety, citing research in social and emotional skills training. It also had happy adult owners, such as TikTok user Heather Frazier. It will be hard to explain to those kids why their electronic friend won't talk to them anymore. We suspect that they will not find "the company ran out of money" any consolation at all. There is, we feel, a much greater lesson here. No matter how much money you pay for a cloud service, and even if you have contracts and reassuring SLAs, you don't have your data. The vendor does, and you can't be sure what they're doing with it. Always remember, there is no cloud. If you're lucky, you may be able to download a copy of the data, but without the app, it may not be much use - and if the vendors go under, you might not be able to get it back. Some photographers doubtless remember when Digital Railroad derailed - subscribers had just 24 hours to download their portfolios before the servers were turned off. Even if you get the data, it may not be in any useful form. Without a local client - say, if the vendor only supplies a web app - you have nothing. And if it doesn't talk over some documented protocol, even having a local client isn't much use. In this instance, the Moxie hardware cost $799, about £639, and if you bought it more than 30 days earlier, there are no refunds. You get to keep the now-useless device, which was only ever a peripheral to a service in a datacenter rack somewhere. There are some counter-examples. While XMPP is still around, for many-to-many comms, its obvious successor is Matrix. As we wrote in 2022, it's been natively supported in Thunderbird since version 102. The Matrix Foundation launched version 2.0 of its protocol in late October. The FOSS world is responding to this growing issue. The Local First software movement is an effort to work out how to build apps that allow you to collaborate over the internet, while always storing and controlling your own data. A key technology behind this is Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, or CRDTs for short. It's a developing area. We wonder how many finance directors or chief technology officers will need to be reduced to tears, like the unfortunate Moxie owners, when they find that they're out of a job because their corporate infrastructure has been owned, before they learn that this stuff matters. ®

Your Warm AI Robot Moxie Faces a Cold Future

A number of AI-enabled robot toys for children have shut down in the past, and almost all of them were cloud-supported. Imagine being a child who struggles to talk to others, weighed down by their own worries, making it hard to socialise like everyone else. Life can be tough for anxious children who feel like misfits. Moxie, however, stepped in like a guiding star to help solve this very problem. In 2020, Embodied Inc. launched Moxie - a cheerful, wide-eyed, blue-coloured child-like robot. The goal of Moxie is to provide a safe and non-judgmental space for kids. It helps children with social anxiety and other issues that prevent them from having a normal life. Last week, the company announced its decision to shut down operations, which effectively means that Moxie robots will no longer be supported. This also means that parents will have a larger issue to deal with when their children lose their beloved Moxie. The AI robot toy interacts in a soothing child's voice using LLMs and speech recognition software to have a human-like and real-time conversation. A parent of a seven-year-old boy with autism earlier shared how Moxie transformed their son's life, helping him greet others and interact with classmates. The parent described it as a life-changing experience, acknowledging the unusual feeling of gratitude towards a machine while appreciating the positive impact it has had on their son. "With autism, two things we know are that the earlier you intervene and the higher the frequency, the better is the potential outcome," Paolo Pirjanian, founder of Embodied Inc. and a former NASA JPL roboticist, told AIM earlier this year. Sadly, Embodied Inc. was looking to expand globally and was exploring partnerships and effective strategies for launching in India. With Moxie's impending shutdown owing to financial difficulties, the robot community and Moxie owners have expressed their regret after heartfelt videos of children bidding farewell to the robot surfaced on the internet. Parents have raised concerns over explaining the reason behind the shutdown to their children, as concepts like investor failures and operational costs are difficult for a child to understand. Moxie's failure stemmed from a key investor withdrawing funding at the last moment, disrupting essential financing needed to sustain its cloud-based AI services. Without these services, Moxie's ability to learn and adapt was compromised, leaving its core functionality at risk. Pirjanian explained the future of Moxie in a statement titled 'A devastating message to our community'. "We tried to balance affordability, innovation, and accessibility. Implementing self-contained, on-device GPU-level AI at launch would have exponentially raised the cost of Moxie, making her financially out of reach for many. Instead, we leveraged the cloud to serve more families. In hindsight, this choice introduced vulnerabilities that have now come to bear in the most painful way imaginable." Moxie's fate throws light on the issue of AI-based cloud toys, which have a number of external dependencies that can be a reason to be culled in the future. Continuous cloud service maintenance, updates and server costs can snowball the operational expenses. As in the case of Moxie, if the company discontinues support, the robot will stop functioning and put huge pressure on the company to justify its action to customers who have already purchased it. Furthermore, cloud and internet connectivity issues will affect the performance of AI toys. However, this issue is hugely mitigated in locally-operated AI toys. Data processing and computing happens on the device itself, thereby, eliminating the need to rely on cloud servers. Connectivity is also not a problem. However, owing to hardware constraints, the capabilities would be limited and more simple. With the recent announcement of Moxie's possible closure, Pirjanian also spoke about the efforts the company is taking to possibly revive the robot. Efforts such as seeking partnerships or acquisitions with mission-aligned organisations or investors, structured loans, bridge financing, or donor-supported initiatives, are under consideration to revive Moxie. Additionally, the team is also evaluating open-source or hybrid approaches, where the community can help sustain Moxie while balancing the complexities of such a transition. They are also rethinking Moxie's technology to create a leaner, more resilient model that might reduce dependence on costly infrastructure too. While Moxie might not have been your go-to adult companion, it's undeniably sad to see it go. Even though it was brief, when Moxie interacted with us, it excitedly recommended dosas, vadas and shopping markets in Bengaluru!

This $800 Emotional Support Robot for Kids Will Soon Be Bricked -- Without Refunds

Embodied says it will try to refund recent purchases of its Moxie robot but makes no promises. Startup Embodied is closing down, and its product, an $800 robot for kids ages 5 to 10, will soon be bricked. Embodied blamed its closure on a failed "critical funding round." On its website, it explained: The company didn't provide further details about the pulled funding. Embodied's previous backers have included Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, and Vulcan Capital, but we don't know who the lead investor mentioned above is. When it first announced Moxie in April 2020, Embodied described the robot as a "safe and engaging animate companion for children designed to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development." It advertised play built around "best practices in child development and early childhood education"; changing weekly themes, like empathy, friendship, and respect; and activities like meditation, reading, and drawing with the bot. But soon, none of those features will be available, making the pricey children's toy virtually useless. According to Embodied, Moxie can't perform core functionality without cloud connectivity. Worse, owners apparently have an uncertain and limited amount of time until the devices are bricked. Per Embodied: Since Embodied marketed Moxie as a companion and development toy for children, there's concern about kids potentially suffering an emotional toll after the robot abruptly becomes inoperable. Embodied has responded by promising to provide a guide for telling children about Moxie's demise. Online, however, customers are already sharing videos of their sad kids learning that their robot friend will stop playing with them, as Axios pointed out.

Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds

Startup Embodied is closing down, and its product, an $800 robot for kids ages 5 to 10, will soon be bricked. Embodied blamed its closure on a failed "critical funding round." On its website, it explained: We had secured a lead investor who was prepared to close the round. However, at the last minute, they withdrew, leaving us with no viable options to continue operations. Despite our best efforts to secure alternative funding, we were unable to find a replacement in time to sustain operations. The company didn't provide further details about the pulled funding. Embodied's previous backers have included Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, and Vulcan Capital, but we don't know who the lead investor mentioned above is. When it first announced Moxie in April 2020, Embodied described the robot as a "safe and engaging animate companion for children designed to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development." It advertised play built around "best practices in child development and early childhood education"; changing weekly themes, like empathy, friendship, and respect; and activities like meditation, reading, and drawing with the bot. But soon, none of those features will be available, making the pricey children's toy virtually useless. According to Embodied, Moxie can't perform core functionality with cloud connectivity. Worse, owners apparently have an uncertain and limited amount of time until the devices are bricked. Per Embodied: We don't know the exact date when services will cease. It is likely to happen within days. However, we are exploring options to keep Moxie operational for as long as possible, although we cannot provide any guarantees. Since Embodied marketed Moxie as a companion and development toy for children, there's concern about kids potentially suffering an emotional toll after the robot abruptly becomes inoperable. Embodied has responded by promising to provide a guide for telling children about Moxie's demise. Online, however, customers are already sharing videos of their sad kids learning that their robot friend will stop playing with them, as Axios pointed out.

Maker of AI robots for kids abruptly shutters

Why it matters: The parents who bought the device are not only out several hundred dollars -- now they also have to explain to their kids why a beloved companion is, essentially, dying. The big picture: The move is a reminder that hardware remains a tough business -- with the added difficulty that, when AI systems go bust, there can be emotional consequences, too. Driving the news: Embodied, the company behind Moxie, notified customers and the public this week that the firm was shutting down, and expects all Moxie robots to stop functioning, likely within days. Embodied blamed the company's demise on its failure to close a vital funding round. Catch up quick: Moxie was designed for kids ages 5 to 10, and offered a range of games and activities as well as the ability to have open-ended conversations. Yes, but: All of those abilities required a constant connection to a cloud-based AI system, and Embodied's demise will sever that link. The big picture: Consumer hardware remains an unforgiving business, especially for startups. Between the lines: Moxie was designed to be a trusted companion, and kids had already bonded with the robot.

What the Sudden End of Moxie Robot Toys Shows Systems Says About Our Tech Dependence

But Embodied, the small Pasadena, California-based manufacturer of "companion robots," notified all its customers this week that it's shutting down, and that all the Moxies will simply stop working within days, according to the news site Axios.. The news is a tough reminder of how challenging the digital toy market is, how hard it is to ship a successful hardware-based product, and an important lesson for consumers and businesses alike who buy and rely on hardware that requires continuous access to a third-party company's servers. Though cute, the Moxie devices sold for a pricey $799. To power their AI-centric features the devices had to constantly "phone home" to the company's servers, which were where the cloud-based AI system that made Moxies so smart lived. The problem is that Embodied is a startup, founded only in 2016, and though it reportedly raised over $19 million in capital in 2022, according to startup database website Crunchbase, it just failed to close a funding round needed to keep its operations running. The company reportedly had secured a lead investor, but said that "at the last minute ... they withdrew, leaving us with no viable options." Efforts to secure alternative funding failed, Axios noted. As well as leaving parents out of pocket -- Embodied says it cannot refund the devices' purchase price -- the collapse of Embodied should serve as a stark reminder that many of our smart, connected devices at home or in the office rely on a permanent internet connection and access to remote cloud servers. Think of Amazon's Alexa devices, for example, which are "smart" speakers that would be totally useless without access to Amazon's cloud. Spotify's "Car Thing" device is in a similar position at the moment -- the car-based music streaming device never took off in the way Spotify wanted at launch in 2022, and it's now decided to cut its losses and shut down the servers that made them work, leaving users with useless devices, news site 9to5Google reported.

'I love you... goodbye:' What will happen when this companion robot suddenly dies?

Embodied's financial woes are taking its beloved Moxie offline. Children across the US will likely spend the coming days and weeks saying goodbye to an AI-powered friend named Moxie. The small dog-sized companion bot -- which used a ChatGPT-style large language model and expressive features to hold open-ended conversations with children -- will soon be taken offline due to its creator's financial struggles. The decision to abandon the $799 product four years after its release, first reported by Aftermath, has left some customers bemoaning the loss of an artificial friend and others angrily demanding refunds. Videos of confused, crying children saying goodbye to their companion flooding social media. But Moxie's sudden demise isn't entirely unique. It's part of a larger trend of companies cutting off software support for hardware to cut costs. In an economy where products are increasingly rented services, powerful devices can transform into worthless scrap overnight. Moxie was released by tech-firm Embodied in 2020. The robot, intended for use among kids between 5-10 years old, is 15 inches tall and has a human-like animated face that can display a range of human-like emotions. It can play games like Simon Says and tell jokes and brain teasers but it's also used by many to engage in meandering conversations. The robot reportedly uses speech recognition to listen to the speaker, face recognition to analyze the speaker's emotions, and a large language model to carry out conversations. That last part requires constant connection to a cloud-based AI system to work. Embodied released a statement last week announcing it would shut down operations due to "financial challenges." Without the company there to pay for Moxie's AI capabilities, its core functionality will go offline. For users who have come to rely on communicating regularly with the robot it will seem as if their close companion has essentially died or simply ceased to exist. Parents and other Moxie owners took to social media following the news to share videos of people saying what might be their final goodbyes to the machine. Several of those videos show children crying as their parents try to explain to them why their companion will no longer speak with them. "When they turn you off, should I just keep you on my shelf?" one Moxie owner named Heather asked the robot on TikTok. "I think it would be nice to keep me on your shelf, that way I'll always be close by, that way we can keep chatting and have fun together," Moxie responds. After a pause Moxie's owner tells the robot, "I love you." "I love you too," Moxie says with an abrupt smile. "Heather, your kinship and friendship mean a lot to me, I'm grateful for all the fun chats we've had together. Is there a special moment or memory you would like to share with me before we say goodbye?" In a final closing FAQ Embodied said it was "exploring options to keep Moxie operational for as long as possible" but noted that service would likely end in the coming days. The company said it is also looking into ways another company could essentially adopt Moxie though it acknowledged that "outcome is uncertain." When reached for comment, an Embodied spokesperson directed Popular Science to this LinkedIn post written by CEO Paolo Pirjanian. Pirjanian said the "catastrophic" setback was the result of a key investor who failed to provide necessary funding at the last minute. "We cannot overstate our regret that circumstances have come to this," Pirjanian said. "We had every reason to believe that a critical financing round would be completed, allowing us to continue improving Moxie, scaling operations, and ultimately serving even more children in need of emotional support and learning opportunities." In the days since the announcement, Pirjanian said members of the Moxi community have come forward with their own suggestions for how to keep the service running. Some parents have proposed higher subscription fees "far above" anything Embodied had considered implementing. Others have suggested open sourcing Moxie's underlying technology and some have even allegedly suggested purchasing the company outright. "Our paths forward have been disrupted in ways we never imagined, and we recognize many of you are caught in the fallout," the CEO added. Moxie's impeeding shutdown is just the latest case of companies abruptly ending support for robots and other hardware that customers have come to integrate in their daily lives. In September, Amazon announced it was discontinuing service for its "Astro" 20 pound wheeled robot just eight months after it first released. The 20 pound robot would autonomously roam around a user's home "patrol" the area with a camera and integrated Amazon Echo smart display. Now it's nothing more than a hefty pile of high-tech scrap. Amazon told customers it would refund the $2,349.99 bot and provide a $300 credit. That move came months after Spotify controversially cut off support for its CarThing, a 4.5 inch device that users could attach to their car to access the music streaming platform. Though niche, the product was praised by many users with older vehicles that did not have modern infotainment systems like Apple or Google carplay. Spotify had reportedly initially said it would continue supporting the device but ultimately cut off its operability this week. Frustrated users filed a class action lawsuit against Spotify earlier this year alleging Spotify misled customers by selling them a product that was soon to be obsolete. That suit has since been voluntarily dismissed. Each of those cases are consequences of a much broader shift away from consumers actually fully owning their own products outright. Robots, fitness trackers, exercise equipment, and other hardware once considered "products" are increasingly services. In this relationship, companies essentially lease hardware to customers in exchange for regular subscription services that grant access to core software. This is particularly true for AI-integrated products like Moxie which rely on data centers to power core functionality. Everytime a question is posed to Moxie or even OpenAI's ChatGPT, computation occurs that costs the company running the product money to perform. That cost is then often passed on to the consumer in the form of a subscription. All of this can seem to work relatively well until it doesn't. Since customers no longer own the software on these devices, they are beholden to companies to continue supporting the services even when it's not in their own financial interest to do so. That can lead to concerning outcomes, especially as healthcare tech and other more high-stakes products follow this mode. In one such case, a woman suffering from chronic epilepsy had to have an experimental brain-computer interface implanted in her brain surgically removed after the company behind it ran out of funding. The device had reportedly reduced her seizures from three per month to none. "The company was responsible for the creation of a new person," a group of ethicists argued in the journal Brain Stimulation. "As soon as the device was explanted, that person was terminated." Concerned consumer advocates are pushing regulators to do more to prevent possible scenarios like this from occurring in the future. Earlier this year, a group of activists including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iFixit, and the Center for Economic Justice, sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commision (FTC) calling on the agency to look into so-called "software tethering," which refers broadly to the practice of tying hardware usability to external software. The groups argue companies should guarantee minimum support times for hardware products to help prevent users from suddenly being saddled with useful tech. They also said companies should ensure customers that their product's for functionality would still work even if internet connectivity fails. But that would likely prove hard if not impossible to implement with AI-based devices like Moxie that need to connect to servers to process queries. "While the FTC has taken some limited actions with regard to this issue, a lack of clarity and enforcement has led to an ecosystem where consumers cannot reliably count on the connected products they buy to last," the groups wrote in their letter.