Your Warm AI Robot Moxie Faces a Cold Future 

Imagine being a child who struggles to talk to others, weighed down by their own worries, making it hard to socialise like everyone else. Life can be tough for anxious children who feel like misfits. Moxie, however, stepped in like a guiding star to help solve this very problem.

In 2020, Embodied Inc. launched Moxie – a cheerful, wide-eyed, blue-coloured child-like robot. The goal of Moxie is to provide a safe and non-judgmental space for kids. It helps children with social anxiety and other issues that prevent them from having a normal life. 

Last week, the company announced its decision to shut down operations, which effectively means that Moxie robots will no longer be supported. This also means that parents will have a larger issue to deal with when their children lose their beloved Moxie.  

The Moxie-Child Bond

The AI robot toy interacts in a soothing child’s voice using LLMs and speech recognition software to have a human-like and real-time conversation. A parent of a seven-year-old boy with autism earlier shared how Moxie transformed their son’s life, helping him greet others and interact with classmates. The parent described it as a life-changing experience, acknowledging the unusual feeling of gratitude towards a machine while appreciating the positive impact it has had on their son.

“With autism, two things we know are that the earlier you intervene and the higher the frequency, the better is the potential outcome,” Paolo Pirjanian, founder of Embodied Inc. and a former NASA JPL roboticist, told AIM earlier this year. Sadly, Embodied Inc. was looking to expand globally and was exploring partnerships and effective strategies for launching in India. 

With Moxie’s impending shutdown owing to financial difficulties, the robot community and Moxie owners have expressed their regret after heartfelt videos of children bidding farewell to the robot surfaced on the internet. Parents have raised concerns over explaining the reason behind the shutdown to their children, as concepts like investor failures and operational costs are difficult for a child to understand. 

Moxie’s failure stemmed from a key investor withdrawing funding at the last moment, disrupting essential financing needed to sustain its cloud-based AI services. Without these services, Moxie’s ability to learn and adapt was compromised, leaving its core functionality at risk.

Pirjanian explained the future of Moxie in a statement titled ‘A devastating message to our community’. “We tried to balance affordability, innovation, and accessibility. Implementing self-contained, on-device GPU-level AI at launch would have exponentially raised the cost of Moxie, making her financially out of reach for many. Instead, we leveraged the cloud to serve more families. In hindsight, this choice introduced vulnerabilities that have now come to bear in the most painful way imaginable.” 

Cloud AI Toys

Moxie’s fate throws light on the issue of AI-based cloud toys, which have a number of external dependencies that can be a reason to be culled in the future. 

Continuous cloud service maintenance, updates and server costs can snowball the operational expenses. As in the case of Moxie, if the company discontinues support, the robot will stop functioning and put huge pressure on the company to justify its action to customers who have already purchased it. 

Furthermore, cloud and internet connectivity issues will affect the performance of AI toys. However, this issue is hugely mitigated in locally-operated AI toys. Data processing and computing happens on the device itself, thereby, eliminating the need to rely on cloud servers. Connectivity is also not a problem. However, owing to hardware constraints, the capabilities would be limited and more simple. 

Reviving Moxie?

With the recent announcement of Moxie’s possible closure, Pirjanian also spoke about the efforts the company is taking to possibly revive the robot. 

Efforts such as seeking partnerships or acquisitions with mission-aligned organisations or investors, structured loans, bridge financing, or donor-supported initiatives, are under consideration to revive Moxie.

Additionally, the team is also evaluating open-source or hybrid approaches, where the community can help sustain Moxie while balancing the complexities of such a transition. They are also rethinking Moxie’s technology to create a leaner, more resilient model that might reduce dependence on costly infrastructure too. 

While Moxie might not have been your go-to adult companion, it’s undeniably sad to see it go. Even though it was brief, when Moxie interacted with us, it excitedly recommended dosas, vadas and shopping markets in Bengaluru! 

Farewell, Moxie.