Moxie

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

~ the goodbye ~

Moxie is a product I read as an engineer rather than as a user. My work is computer vision that has to run on the aircraft itself, where the governing constraint is that you cannot assume a link back to anything. Moxie made the opposite call at every level of the stack, and in January 2025 the bill for that landed in a few thousand living rooms on the same afternoon.

Embodied, Inc. was founded by Paolo Pirjanian, previously chief technology officer at iRobot, and announced Moxie in April 2020. It was a rounded blue thing about a foot tall with an animated face, priced at $799 and aimed at children between five and ten. The idea was social and emotional practice. It held a running conversation with the child and remembered what had happened in earlier sessions, which is the part that made a real difference for families of autistic children.

That is also what made the ending hard to write about at the time. Parents who had spent a year watching a withdrawn child talk to something had to sit down and explain a corporate insolvency instead. Several of the pieces from December 2024 quote the same phrase from parents, that it felt like a sad Pixar movie, and that is about right.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the architecture ~

Nothing meaningful ran on the device. The microphone and camera pushed audio and video up to Embodied's cloud, where the speech recognition and the emotional model both lived, and the response came back down for the face and the voice to perform. The robot on the desk was a speaker with a screen and a motor behind it.

In 2020 that was a defensible call, and I would have argued for it in a review meeting. Models of that quality did not fit inside an $799 consumer bill of materials, and putting the intelligence server-side meant the product could get better without a firmware update ever shipping. What it also meant is that the robot's continued existence was a recurring line item on a startup's monthly costs.

~ the postmortem ~

Embodied told customers on 26 November 2024 that it was ceasing operations. A lead investor had pulled out of a critical funding round at the last minute and no replacement could be found in the time available. The first letter gave families a vague window rather than a date. The servers were finally switched off on 30 January 2025.

The refund position was the ugly part. Purchases made inside the previous thirty days were refundable and nothing else was, on the grounds that the company had no money left, which was true. Warranty support ended the same way. A device sold as a long-term companion for a small child came with roughly two months of notice.

~ what got buried with it ~

Some of it came back. A volunteer project called OpenMoxie reverse-engineered enough of the protocol to point the robots at a local server, and there are Moxies running in houses today with no company behind them whatsoever. Embodied did release material that made the effort possible, which is more than most firms in that position manage on the way out.

The wider problem outlived the product. There is still no rule anywhere requiring that a device sold to a child keep working after the seller fails, and no standard for what an end-of-life mode should even look like. Moxie is what people point at when they argue there should be one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »