The Fuseproject Moxie Robot to Launch this Fall

The latest educational tech comes in the form of a seven-pound robot designed by Fuseproject, Moxie. Moxie looks like something ripped out of a Pixar movie. 

It is an adorable educational robot, designed for teaching kids at home. But it’s expensive, at $1,500, and requires a $60 monthly subscription after the first year.

With input from an ex-Jim Henson designer, the Embodied startup will be the robotics and AI company team behind Moxie.

Embodied and Fuseproject said the robot will teach kids ages six through nine. It uses weekly themes and lessons designed to promote cognitive, emotional, and social learning.

The designers created the empathetic friend and teacher to share lesson plans that parents can download from their cloud weekly.

Moxie will rely on kids to help it learn more human experiences and life skills, like going to the dentist. It could also learn new words and chat about these experiences with them.

Parents will be able to control Moxie through an app. The parent app will let them check their child’s progress and limit their Moxie usage.

Privacy and security have always been a big concern for parents and guardians, especially with educational technology for children. The Fuseproject robot is unlikely to be the exception because the manufacturers will encrypt its data.

Parents or guardians are the only ones able to access the data for their particular unit. 

Paolo Pirjanian founded Embodied. He sold a robotic vacuum company to iRobot, maker of the Roomba, before taking over as CTO.

It has raised $41 million in funding from an all-star group of investors in robotics and AI. This includes Amazon, Intel, Sony, and Toyota. 

Before working on Moxie, the Fuseproject chief creative officer Craig Allan worked at Jim Henson and Disney.

The Moxie Project

Designers originally intended Moxie for autistic children. Now, Fuseproject is marketing Moxie to all young children through subscriptions that offer new educational lessons every week.

The robot still has a lot of tech features that can be used for interacting with and monitoring those nearby. For example, inside its head are four microphones, and a camera located on the front.

Other kids’ tech, like a smart Barbie, uses speech recognition technology to learn about its owner. Toymaker Mattel says the doll’s voice-recognition technology allows it to have a unique relationship with its owner. But advocates from the Campaign for a Commercial-free Childhood (CCFC) say some could exploit the new technology.

The Aristotle was also Mattel’s attempt as a smart speaker for children. It was an AI assistant assigned to sing lullabies and teach children the basics of the ABCs. 

Mattel has shelved plans to build this all-in-one voice-controlled smart baby monitor. This was after privacy advocates, and child psychologists raised complaints about the device.

These kids’ techs have run into controversy due to the privacy implications of building microphones into toys meant for kids.

Several companies have tried to make friendly robots to interact with at home in recent years, like Aibo and Jibo.

Aibo is Sony’s $2,900 robotic pet, while Jibo is a family robot. Jibo was successfully crowdfunded only to flop a couple of years into its life span.