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Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and in this episode we talk about

robotics in the home becoming a reality. Boris Softman, CEO and co-founder of Anki and Dave Turetsky,

Professor of Computer Science at CMU, discuss with me the evolution of robotics, where we are

in manipulation, perception, navigation, and most

importantly in the human relationships we will increasingly form to these new robot entities

that will be in our homes.

So you guys talk about this as sort of the very first real robot companion.

Let's go back and look at the first iteration, which was Cosmo.

Why start with a toy?

What does that represent for where we are now and ultimately where we're trying to get to in robotics?

Yes.

So when we started Anki, we always realized that in order to get into some of these really advanced applications,

we had to take a bottoms up approach.

And we couldn't just skip to this holy grail that's 10 years away. We had to think about what are

the applications where we could really reinvent the quality of what's possible. Well, what is the

holy grill? So there's all of these types of challenges that involve really deep breakthroughs in

human robot interface or manipulation or AI. There's the large scale, diverse humanoid or like very competent robot for home or for

manufacturing or for other things. There's applications that involve very high-end manipulation

...