Boris Sofman: "Engineering emotion"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2018

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Boris Sofman, founder of Anki, a maker of AI-powered toys, to talk about why he chose toys (2:45), convincing investors to back him (5:25), starting out making a real life Mario Kart (7:20), using a prototype to pitch (9:50), creating a Pixar-style robot (13:05), putting software at the heart of its toy (17:00), engineering emotion (18:05), the importance of eye contact (21:15), if toys can get ‘too good’ (23:50), the difference from old-school companies (25:25), the future of ‘the family robot’ (27:15), why Anki won’t be a toy company for long (31:40), growing up in Russia and Texas (34:30), studying robots at Carnegie Mellon (35:30), and the explosion of the robotics industry (37:30).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Alps, your weekly dispatch from deep inside the Alpine milk and cheese machine.
0:08.7	Yes, you heard that right.
0:10.6	I'm actually on holiday this week.
0:12.3	So even as you listen to this, I am somewhere high up in the Swiss Alps yodeling.
0:17.4	But I have still made sure that you get your weekly dose of the show.
0:22.1	But before we get to that, I just wanted to thank you.
0:25.3	We just passed 205-star reviews on Apple Podcast this past week, which is just really
0:30.3	incredible.
0:30.8	So truly thank you for your support.
0:33.4	It really does mean a lot.
0:34.4	So please keep those reviews coming in.
0:36.7	And I'll do my best to keep tracking down the most interesting people in this wild world of tech and bringing them to you every week, even when I'm on vacay.
0:46.6	Speaking of which, let's get on to today's show.
0:50.7	Yo, technology.
0:53.3	What is it all about?
0:55.0	Ah!
0:56.0	That funny little voice you heard. That funny little voice you heard was Cosmo.
1:14.7	And the other guy, that was Boris Softman, who's the founder of Anki, the maker of Cosmo.
1:20.5	And Anki is a really interesting company.
1:23.1	So today, Anki is a toy company that has made Cosmo, which is an AI-powered robot that fits in the
1:28.9	palm of your hand and can recognize your kid. You can play games. It can react to your emotions.
1:34.8	You can kind of think of it like a little plastic puppy, powered by 2 million lines of code,
	...

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