Pleo

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

~ the last words ~

pleo never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was the kind of robot toy that lived in us toy stores and ces demo videos, with a price tag that put it well above what anyone i knew would buy a child or themselves. when i first read about it in some tech roundup around 2008, my reaction was the engineer reaction. ambitious sensor stack on top of a category that had never sustained itself.

ugobe was an idaho-based startup co-founded by caleb chung, who had already co-designed the furby a decade earlier. the difference was scope. furby was a foam-stuffed novelty with a single motor and a fake-language script. pleo was a quadruped with fourteen motors, two microphones, a beak-mounted camera, skin-touch sensors across the body, and four-foot infrared sensors. the software was meant to give each unit a slowly-developing personality based on what it experienced. unveiled at the demo conference in scottsdale in february 2006, finally shipping in december 2007 after delays.

the company sold maybe a hundred thousand units in its first year at 349 dollars apiece. the math did not work. each pleo was expensive to manufacture and the holiday window in 2008 was the worst possible time to be selling a luxury robot toy. ugobe burned through funding rounds and laid off its entire staff in march 2009. chapter 7 followed in april. by june a hong kong company called jetta picked up the assets and brought the product back as pleo rb, a slimmer toy with a smaller team behind it. it stayed available in some form into the mid-2010s before quietly going away.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the demos were the best part of pleo, before you owned one. journalists handed a unit at a press event got the version everyone wanted: a little dinosaur that nuzzled into your hand and made small chirpy noises. you can find youtube footage from those demos that still looks impressive. owners reported a flatter experience. battery life was around an hour. the personality system was real but slow to develop, while the joints started grinding after a few months of play. it was a complicated machine doing a simple thing.

~ what got buried with it ~

ugobe was an early swing at consumer robots that anki and jibo and kuri would all later swing at again, with broadly the same outcome. the underlying lesson kept repeating: a 349-dollar robot toy needs to do something a parent can immediately explain to a child or a child can immediately explain to a friend. pleo's pitch was "it grows up." that takes weeks. by the time the personality emerged, the kid had moved on. anki shipped vector ten years later with the same problem in a smaller package, and ran out of money the same way.

~ the long tail ~

pleos still show up on ebay. there is a small community of owners who repair their joints, replace the batteries, and trade tips on the open-source firmware that fans cracked years after the company died. you can buy a working unit for less than its original price, which says something about how fragile this category turned out to be as a market and how durable it can be as a hobby.

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