Temi, The Personal Robot
West Coast District Manager of b8ta, Nick Romero, introduces us to the Temi Robot, a personal robot assistant and the future of in-home robotics. Temi robot can do anything from controlling your music to allowing you to be anywhere through telepresence.
Transcribed using Artificial Intelligence
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
robot, lidar, alexa, Temi, digital assistant, surfaces, packages, subwoofer, facial recognition, segway, controlling, nice, robust, display, talk, LOOMO, streams, robots, teleconferencing, walk, great, pull, personal robot, segway, ninebot
SPEAKERS
Temi The Robot, Sebastien Perez, Nick Romero
Sebastien Perez 00:00
How you doing Nick? How you doing Temi?
Nick Romero 00:02
I am good. She's always good. So Temi is obviously a telepresence robot, we have been working with them for a few months now. They're actually an internationally based company, they have half their team in Israel and another half here in the US, and are in a lot of our beta stores. So they actually have been in pre-order for quite some time. And just this week, it's actually great timing for live stream that they actually are shipping units as of today I believe to customers. So everyone is happily getting their Temi robots, and we'll be experiencing the coolest for themselves.
Sebastien Perez 00:41
Very cool.
Temi The Robot 00:42
(Temi The Robot is displaying a video of Sebastien on her head screen) music plays (Sebastien is waving is a big smile)
Nick Romero 00:42
So I mean, Temi got a lot of features to her. The kind of biggest, kind of interesting mechanical parts to it, obviously, are the digital assistant, which is going to be very much like, what a lot of people have seen in digital assistance from companies like Amazon or Google. But Temi is all proprietary to her own system. She's also got a second brain that lives down in the bottom, which controls the LIDAR. So for those of you don't know, LIDAR is the same technology that self driving cars are using. So she is excellent at judging distance, and speed for being able to follow you around. So in essence, this is a robot that can be your digital assistant and can follow you all around your house or office.
Sebastien Perez 01:30
Yeah, so they've got this first of all the product design is I think, pretty nice, sleek, minimal. I like how they didn't necessarily go after the the humanoid look. Because that kind of scares people off. So this is kind of like asleep, doesn't have any arms. You know, it's more of like an appliance rather than trying to be a human. And it does have facial tracking, right?
Nick Romero 01:53
it does have facial recognition. She is very, very capable of moving around a lot of different surfaces as well. And it's interesting, you talked about the height, too, that was actually a very intentional design feature in making this very approachable, very family friendly and having something that was essentially child-sized that people could have in their homes. And it wasn't a huge, unwieldy robot,
Sebastien Perez 02:17
huh, exactly. That'd be intimidating to the smaller members of the family.
Nick Romero 02:21
Exactly. robotics are still something that I think is being, you know, accepted, more widely. And so when you talk about user design, this is really a great use case of something that is been customized to the user to be kind of more friendly and more accessible.
Sebastien Perez 02:39
Yeah, it makes sense. So there are a few more things, right?
Nick Romero 02:42
So beyond the just the the cool, you know, aspect, she does have a little shelf back here might be a little hard to see on camera. But there is a wireless charging capable pad on the back. So you can have your phone charging. On the back while you're having her falling around the house. The digital assistant is pretty robust, has a lot of different features. Being able to obviously do teleconferencing, which we showed you earlier, you can set up local locations within your home. So you can tell Temi to go to a certain location. And she can do that. She can pull up all kinds of media, she's got connection to the Internet, of course, so she can take photos, you can send those off to friends, you can access your latest news. You can pull up radio stations, you can pull up videos on YouTube, your weather, there's lots of different options on this, and it's only going to get better. Temi's assistant is pretty robust. But it is no secret that the skies will actually be shipping with Amazon Alexa.
Sebastien Perez 03:41
Oh Amazon, sure Amazon packages, that is awesome!
Temi The Robot 03:41
(Video of Temi The Robot who is seen interacting and filming a dog and kids at home all of it controlled by the mother of the kids) (Video of Temi The Robot who is seen interacting with 3 business people and another person controlling to participate in a meeting) (business people wave at Temi The Robot)
Nick Romero 03:41
Yes Alexa, so that's actually going to add a lot more functionality here. And to packages too. It 's much more robust, you know, sort of API for development and lots of really cool interest from a lot of developers in making content for this.
Sebastien Perez 03:55
I am kind of glad that you brought up Alexa for a second one of our past streams, which is really fun. And if you haven't had a chance to check it out, make sure you go back to our past streams. We did AI versus AI. And we did in am Alexa versus the Google Home. And we had a rap battle. And it was a whole thing. So now Alexa, destroyed Google in our competition. I'm not going to say in general, but and so that being said, it's only right that Alexa would be chosen. And that's maybe further evidence. That the superiority is there. I mean, I love being able to be notified with my packages, the orange light, I mean, this guy would probably or lady would walk up. And probably let us know that the package is here or something we can imagine that integration going a little farther.
Nick Romero 04:43
Absolutely. I mean, the sky's the limit when you talk about integrations with Alexa. So I think that was really a big factor for them and putting that in the robot.
Sebastien Perez 04:51
Oh yes, that is for sure.
Nick Romero 04:52
You know, she's also got excellent sound built into a twofer, video and music portions. They built Harman Kardon speakers, both into the front here, as well as the bottom for the subwoofers. So it's very, very robust sound. So you're really getting a very premium experience out of this robot and every aspect.
Sebastien Perez 05:10
Yeah, I mean, if you think about maybe some of the few products that you would invest and spend your money on, we all in a way, spend a lot on devices, like our cell phones or other smart devices, which can be run over 1000 bucks, you know, some iPad pros and these kind of things, then you add in a premium speaker, and you start to kind of see where this thing makes sense as an all-in-one, the audio is really great. If you're not familiar with Harman Kardon, they do a lot of the high end luxury cars sound systems. So that being said, it's a luxury product. And it looks like one two, yeah, I think the display I read is a very nice display. It's a QHD screen. So very high end display. Can we throw a song on?
Nick Romero 06:02
Yes, for sure, yeah.
Sebastien Perez 06:03
Just to even though it's going to be perceived wrong through the mic, of how it is, but I mean, it really has a great subwoofer and everything. So I mean, this thing could be the life of the party easily. I'm just jumping in a few questions here. I see that. Cliff says I'm about to live stream, the immersion track at Digital Hollywood, your feed is coming in nice and clean. Thanks, Cliff for tuning in. Always a pleasure. Alex says let's connect soon. Michelle says very cool. And Martin says really cool stuff. Nice. Awesome.
Nick Romero 06:40
It really is. So here I'll give you guys a little sample. This is just some video content. (music playing) Let me turn up the volume here.
Temi The Robot 06:56
(Temi The Robot is playing a video with loud base sounds)
Sebastien Perez 06:59
This thing has base. Base in your face from Temi. (laughs) So yeah, it's really cool. He uses LIDAR. He uses LIDAR in order to do facial recognition. Well, all of its 3d mapping. And by projecting, it is basically like, if you're not familiar with LIDAR, it's like a spinning light that is projecting light points all around. And then it gives them a measure of distance. So when you see like a cruise automation car, you'll see those LIDAR spinning and actually under Temi, if you look under the plastic lid, you'll see that there's something rotating there.
Nick Romero 07:45
Yes, that's correct. We've actually also had customers ask about that and they were interested. In sort of understanding LIDAR and making sure that these are essentially lasers, and the effects of that are still sort of being studied. So they've been very thoughtful about the placement of these. So it both helps for navigation, as well as for safety concerns that they've located this at the bottom of the robot. And it really helps Temi navigate and actually gives her a lot of control when going over different types of surfaces. So Temi is not even just for beautiful hardwood floors or a concrete surface, I can hear Temi actually can work great on carpet, or even thicker surfaces as well.
Sebastien Perez 08:25
Yeah. And I mean, I think what's really cool about this is not only can you do sight, sort of like this telepresence where you can have a physical presence in a place that you are not, and we're seeing a lot of that VR controlling robots and these kind of things. But it also is a great tool for accessibility, you think about someone who might have a disability and can't walk or can't kind of get around to these places or even see things , it's kind of like this remote moving camera can call family members and everything so.
Nick Romero 09:00
That's very true. I mean, initially, these types of robots were developed for office applications for being able to have a conference where you could walk around the office, things like that, and increasingly, we've seen these more and more attractive to people in their homes. They want to be able to give it to an elderly family member who can dial in and actually see them in real time and follow them around the house.
Temi The Robot 09:18
(Temi The Robot is following Sebastien inside the B8ta store)
Sebastien Perez 09:27
Oh right everybody. What are your thoughts? Leave your comments below and make sure to suscribe to the TDA channel on YouTube. Follow us here for more and also check our Linkedin channel at https://www.linkedin.com/in/thedigitalacid/, have a good one and see you soon.
Notes from the Publisher:
During filming Temi was priced at around $2,000. According to its website the price is now $3,999 .
TEMI The Personal Robot is now priced at $3,999
A premium designed, video-oriented, autonomous personal AI assistant robot. temi can recognise and follow when requested, save preset locations, and navigate flawlessly around your home and office while connecting you to your friends, family and favorite web services.
Other personal robots such as the Segway Ninebot LOOMO Advanced Personal Robot and Personal Transporter are now available for $1,789.
