Companies like Amazon and Google are in a constant war over your attention. Looking to completely become integrated with your home, as well as your daily life. They can see who’s at the front door, and how the baby is sleeping, or what temperature you like on average. Bring it all together with smart control of all of your favorite lighting, outlets, or appliances, and you have a relatively strong smart home. So where do you go from there? How about robots? This is where the Amazon Astro household robot comes into the picture.
Very similar to something like Trifo’s Lucy robot vacuum, only with Amazon Alexa built-in and a neat screen that trades between displaying the robot’s face and various media content that you can play like any other Alexa device with a screen (ie, Echo Show). That, and minus the vacuum part since it doesn’t do that sadly–it should though (I can’t figure out why Amazon didn’t add that into the mix).
Basically, Amazon Astro is an Echo Show on a set of wheels and a few new tricks. Quite a few actually. It can follow you around (if you ask it to), has a camera that can be extended from the body so you can remote view things from various heights, it can carry things, and it offers a sentinel mode.
That’s right. This is where it becomes quite similar to the Lucy robot vacuum (minus the ability to vacuum). It can patrol your home while you are away like some kind of robot sentinel guard. Similar to many of the other Echo devices, it has the ability to listen for certain sounds (ie, smoke alarms, breaking glass, etc) and detect movement that shouldn’t be there. Alerting you when something happens. It’s part of Amazon’s Alexa Guard feature.
It offers object avoidance, including the ability to detect and avoid small animals (cats, dogs, etc) so that it doesn’t accidently run over their tail (or them) while also avoiding any false alerts caused by said animals.
You can make use of the normal features found within an Echo device, such as checking the weather, controlling the devices around your home, triggers video chats with friends and family, as well as anything else these amazing devices are capable of. All while following you around the house in the process (if it needs to).
Also similar to some of those vacuum cleaners (…minus the vacuum feature), it will even return to its dock when it is either told to, or it starts running low on battery. You can also manually set certain no-go zones for it to completely avoid.
Finally, there is the price. Oh, does it come with a price. Did I mention it doesn’t vacuum? For the price, I think it should vacuum. I don’t know if I have emphasized that enough. The MSRP for the Amazon Astro household robot is $999.99. Making for a steap price (for something that doesn’t vacuum–what a shame). However, it does look like a fun device to have around the home.
For now though, I am going to guess that this is going to be more of a gimmick product for now until the price comes down to something a little more reasonable for the general public. That, or if they decide to add in a number of additional features (like vacuuming, mopping, or babysitting). Maybe they can get it to play with your pets while you are away, keeping them company, and maybe even dispense food once in awhile.
It is also available via invitation only. No release date has been announced by the company just yet. So unless you get one of these mysterious invites, you won’t even have the chance to buy one if you wanted to. However, if you do wind up getting one of these invites, and you do get your hands on one, feel free to reach out to us with your experience. We’d love to hear about it.
