Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant device is quite talkative, but until now there hasn’t been a face to put to the voice. Omate has answered this problem with a new family-friendly robot dubbed Yumi.
Yumi stands just under a foot tall and boasts wheels and a rotating head. The artificial intelligence platform runs on Alexa and has the ability to pull up Android apps that can be utilized via the 5-inch HD touchscreen display that also serves as Yumi’s face. This display also incorporates a front-facing camera to make video calls.
Powering Yumi is a 1.3-Ghz quad-core ARM Cortex processor and Omate’s Robotics AI (ORAI 1.0) operating system. Thanks to Alexa, the personal robot boasts over 3,000 skills, including booking an Uber, rocking out with Spotify for music streaming, and controlling the home with Hive. Additionally, there’s always the option of asking questions like Alec Baldwin in the Amazon commercial.
Yumi comes with 1 GB of memory and 8 GB of storage. The Omate robot also features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, along with HDMI and USB ports. With the HDMI port, Yumi can connect to a TV.
Omate is raising funds to complete production of its Yumi robots through Indiegogo, with packages to back the project starting at $250. Yumi is expected to retail for $599 starting in the third quarter of 2017.