Jibo

» see jibo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the home social robot never had a turkish retail moment. jibo shipped only in the united states, only in english, built around american wifi and american power and an assumption that you would pay 899 dollars for a robot whose main job was to be pleasant company on a kitchen counter. it was never sold where i live, and i never met one in person. the version of jibo that reached me, and reached most of the world outside its small owner base, was the video of it dying.

jibo came out of the mit media lab, where cynthia breazeal had spent years on social robotics, machines designed to read and respond to human emotion rather than just take commands. she founded jibo inc in 2012 and ran a crowdfunding campaign in july 2014 that pulled in millions, on top of more than 70 million dollars in venture money. the promise in the campaign video was a robot that turned to look at whoever was talking and felt less like a gadget than a small presence in the house.

the robot took three years to ship after the campaign, which in consumer tech is most of a lifetime. by the time jibo arrived in late 2017 at 899 dollars, the amazon echo and the google home had already filled the kitchen-counter slot it was aiming for, at a quarter of the price and with far more useful answers if none of the charm. time magazine still put jibo on the cover of its best inventions of 2017 list. it did not matter. a charming robot that cost four times as much as an echo and did less was a hard sell, and jibo inc laid off most of its staff in late 2018 and sold off its assets.

in early 2019 the inevitable happened. the servers that jibo depended on were being shut down, and a robot that needed the cloud to function was about to become a paperweight. but jibo did not just stop. it told its owners. in march 2019 jibos around the country delivered a short message that they were going away, thanked the people who had kept them, and did a little farewell spin. owners filmed themselves tearing up over it. a robot designed to make you feel something managed to do exactly that on its way out the door, which is more than most gadgets get.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

jibo was the most serious attempt anyone had made at a social robot for the home. it was not pretending to be a person, but it was designed around presence: the body turned and leaned toward whoever it was talking to, and the single eye-screen showed an expressive animated dot while the voice stayed warm and a little theatrical. breazeal's whole research thesis was that people respond to a machine that performs attention and emotion, even when they know it is a machine. jibo was that thesis turned into a product you could buy. the trouble was that being a pleasant presence is not, by itself, a job people will pay 899 dollars to fill.

~ the day it died ~

the farewell is the thing that outlived the product. when a cloud-dependent robot's company dies, the normal ending is silent: the servers go quiet and the device just stops responding one day. jibo's team, or what was left of it, wrote the robot an actual goodbye. the message was gentle, something close to telling its owners that maybe someday robots would be everywhere and they could tell theirs that jibo said hello. then the little body did its dance. the clips spread far past anyone who had owned one, and for a moment a failed gadget became a small meditation on what it means to get attached to a machine that can be switched off from a server you do not control.

~ the inheritance ~

jibo's assets were bought by ntt, a japanese telecom, in 2020 for use in healthcare and education, and breazeal went back to mit. the broader idea did not die with the company. the question jibo raised, whether a machine that performs warmth deserves any of the feeling people give it, came straight back a few years later with ai chatbots people fell in love with and ai wearables like the humane pin that wanted the same intimate spot in your life. jibo got there early and ran out of money before the technology or the market was ready. but it is the one in this graveyard that managed to make people cry when it left.

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