Meet Yumi, the first Amazon Alexa-powered robot. How closely tied to Amazon is Yumi? Well, look a little closer at its smile in the video above and you’ll notice Yumi’s mouth is the Amazon logo.
Created by Omate, Yumi stands 11.7 inches tall and features a rotating head and wheels. However, it appears the wheels are used just to rotate Yumi and not actually move it around.
You interact with Yumi just like you do with Amazon Echo – using your voice. Yumi features voice recognition technology from Sensory, which recently partnered with Amazon to bring its Alexa technology to other devices. Yumi has access to more than 3,000 Amazon Alexa skills, and Omate says you can ask Yumi anything you want to know – the weather forecast, news, traffic, etc.
Yumi has a 1.3-GHz quad-core ARM Cortex processor with 1 GB of memory and 8 GB of storage. It runs Omate’s Robotics Artificial Intelligence (ORAI 1.0) operating system that is based on Android.
Omate will make the full Android ecosystem available to developers so they can build and test their own applications. Yumi features a 3,500 mAh battery, but Omate hasn’t released details on how long the battery lasts. Maybe that will become clearer when it launches on Indiegogo on November 15.
The features on Yumi, which will be offered in black and white models. (Credit: Omate)
“We have spent over a year from design to engineering in order to give birth to Yumi. It required deep Android software customization to combine high-end audio and state-of-the-art AI into its complex mechanical design,” says Laurent Le Pen, Founder & CEO at Omate. “Yumi has been built on AI from the ground up, it is an incredibly smart and cute robot; a personal assistant, a music hub and a smart-home control point all in one.”
Yumi also has a 5-inch HD 1280 x 720 capacitive touchscreen display that you can use to browse the web, watch videos and play games. The display also has a front-mounted camera that can be used for making video calls and security surveillance. Yumi can be connected to your TV either via HDMI, and it also has Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.
Yumi robot specs. (Credit: Omate)
Omate says Yumi has powerful wireless speakers to play your music from popular streaming services such as Spotify or Pandora. It also has five embedded microphones that allow the Yumi to pinpoint where a voice is coming from and turn its head accordingly.
The Yumi Developer Edition will go for $349 on Indiegogo starting November 15. Omate says Yumi will be available to the masses sometime in the third quarter of 2017 for $599.
