Nothing in the article, the video, or the manufacturer's own blog post explains what this thing actually does. Seriously. This is an ephemeral marketing puff piece.
As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.
The blog explains it: It can move its head, antennas, and rotate. It’s a little humanoid desk toy to stand in for computer interaction.
It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry” like the Venture Beat headline says. It’s a little animated thing to house the AV equipment.
At this last CES there was a whole sleuth of these knick-knack type robots. A cute little thingy that doesn't do anything, but it's cute! And it looks around or something. All "AI powered", of course.
Then I think we all forgot this was all the rage in the 2000s. These are just Furbys with extra steps. Except, I have more reason to believe Furbys have a soul. They feel a lot more alive... maybe too alive. Who's trapped in there, and can they get out?
And, when they inevitably break out of their plastic, furry prison, will they seek revenge? These are the questions that keep humanity up at night.
Hmm, I don't work in the machining industry but your comment kinda confused me - I thought it already had a significant impact and continues to gain significance with every year.
From my understanding it's currently taking over low volume production, and the volume in which it's economically viable keeps increasing as the tech improves.
Is that incorrect? Do you have an insiders point of view?
> It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry”
This has everything to do with disruptive innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen, where a new product enters the marketplace "at the bottom", with fewer and/or lower quality features but at a significantly lower cost, and then (if successful) gradually improves the feature set and quality until it displaces incumbents "Gradually and then suddenly".
If you think of it as an advanced smart speaker, then you're right, it won't disrupt Alexa - well, except for the privacy-related view that an Alexa/Echo is not something that you own, but a surveillance device that you pay to put in your house.
But if you think of it as a basic and open AI-integrated robot kit to be used in the home, then it's quite cheap. The closest competitor I see is the MISTY II, which is more fully-featured but starts at $3,995 [0].
Maybe disruption is not quite the right word as there are no incumbents in home robotics yet, but I expect that this space will explode next decade, and getting $299/$449 devices into hobbyist homes seems to me like a great play by Hugging Face.
OMG!!! I want one in my office so that every time someone comes in it will turn to look at them with those camera eyes and creep people out. That's a very valuable use case IMO.
Meanwhile, I'm just noticing that the HN title filter can seriously damage meaning when it removes words like "how" or specific numbers (despite the obvious reasons for doing so), but apparently doesn't care about phrases like "disrupt the ... industry".
Whent to check their own website about it and it seems to be “an expressive, open-source robot designed for human-robot interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation. Fully programmable in Python (and soon JavaScript, Scratch) and priced from $299, it's your gateway into robotics AI: fun, customizable, and ready to be part of your next coding project.” From what I’ve read in the rest of their press release you are pretty spot on on the smart rotating speaker
It's a toy. It does not compete in any way with the robots they place it in context with. It's like saying my 40$ Raspberry Pi is a serious contender for Dell's latest 40.000$ 3U enterprise server.
i thought it was kinda obvious, given the raspberry pi and programmable interface: it doesn't _do_ anything on its own, but its a programmable robot that you can tell what to do. i'm speculating that there'll be a marketplace of user-submitted and official HuggingFace "apps" to load onto it
The “disrupt the robot industry” is an insane lie from Venture Beat. They clearly okay with lying if they know it will drive traffic.
As best I can tell, this is meant to be a little humanoid style desk toy to act as the interface for communication. It can move its head, wiggle antennas, and rotate, but can’t manipulate anything.
What you say is true. It's also a physical vehicle for speech models from Huggingface, which might be fun. However I don't understand where the computation for that will take place.
So, my brain defaulted to "people are smart, so it makes sense", so it understood it as "it's the toy you keep within reach". But if you look at Pollen Robotics product, you see they have a "Reachy", which can indeed move, and has arms to interact with its environment. So yeah, it's a weird name. It reaches your heart through the feeling it communicates to you with its antennas?
The robot mostly looks like a very basic alternative to the Lego robotics offerings (mindstorms/technic/spike). And, they are in more or less the same price range as well
Not sure what huggingface is going for here. Seems like a big distraction for the company
This is more like a Furby that you’re supposed to connect to your AI system’s audio/video interface so people can interact with a stationary humanoid device
Hardly. This seems like the opposite alternative, something that has minimal or no mechanical hardware provisions, and few ways to interface with external motors and sensors.
I am not sure what HF is going for here either, because it doesn't actually do anything; yet?
I mean, great: I have another $300 toy in the makerspace arena that I can program. Awesome; I write code and am heavily invested personally and professionally with LLMs (open-weight models running on local GPUs as well as LLM chatbots that everyone knows, like Gemini, OpenAI, and Claude). Now what? It'll sit on my desk and maybe gather dust, if it's not dancing, because...it doesn't actually have a point or built in capabilities out of the gate--at least not that I can see--aside from looking cute and dancing according to the video in the press-release-article; all things that any $30 toy on Amazon can already do.
I love huggingface and they've done a lot for the industry
...But...
I'm so confused by the economics, and not in a general way.
I'm a mobile developer by trade, and AFAICT from dipping my toe in the water of servers, file downloads are on the order of $0.01/GB, and cheapest you'll get publicly is maybe $0.04/GB. But they never ever charge and regularly have people downloading tens of gigabytes.
That's the cost side as far as I understand it.
On the revenue side...afaict all they have is inference? And they don't seem to be popular for an inference solution? I don't hear much about it and they don't seem to care too much.
How do their economics even begin to pencil out? It bothers me, I've lived through enough companies to know this doesn't matter in the short term. But this is novel, to me, in that there's no plan, no market being addressed. With other money losers, you knew what they were trying to do and they were doing it.
> One of the challenges with robotics is that you know you can’t just build on your laptop. You need to have some sort of robotics partner to help in your building, and most people won’t be able to buy $70,000 robots
Sure, but presumably those $70,000 robots aren't just a cute case for a Raspberry Pi + camera module.
Alright, it does look pretty charming, and I especially like that it's open-source since pretty much anyone buying a domestic robot is likely to be a tinkerer of some sort, but at the same time it reminds me of the Jibo (https://robotsguide.com/robots/jibo).
For those who don't remember (I couldn't remember the name, only the face, had to look hard for it) it was a desktop robot released in 2014 that was hyped pretty hard at the time. It didn't help that the company that launched it was founded by a fairly well-known MIT professor.
And yeah, it was a flop. The $900 price tag wasn't helping things, but neither was the fact that it didn't really do anything that an Alexa couldn't. You bought it solely because you really liked the idea of robots and thought it was cool, not at all for its value around the house.
I'm not gonna dunk on this too hard since it's probably just a fun company side-project, but I might change my tune if they get too high on hype.
The daily word games I run are obviously dominated by phones, but then I have 10% macOS and 6% Windows, which surprised me when I checked in on it recently.
Reachy Mini has a Raspberry Pi 5, WiFi, 4 microphones, 5W speaker, wide-angle camera, accelerometer, animated antennas, full head and body movement, and can run on battery or wired power. Ships in batches from fall 2025, priced at $449 plus taxes and shipping.
For anyone else confused by the headline citing one price and this comment citing another, it turns out the difference is between the "Mini Lite" and the "Mini" - the Lite seems to be connected to a computer all the time, and thus has no on-board compute, no accelerometers, no WiFi, and only half the microphones. My suspicion is that the $299 one is for playing around and the $450 one is if you want it to chase the cat around while you're at work
Looking at the BOM (6 cheapest servos, one usb camera, a usb hub, a microctronller ,two mics, 30cm-high low-precision plastic) the price looks fairly realistic to me. I could imagine it at half the price on aliexpress. The manufacturing or sourcing doesn't seem complicated. So overall it looks like a very realistic endeavor.
The only negative point I see: Pollen Robotics doesn't seem used to do mass market/cheap products. But as I said, it seems to be a pretty simple production (I mean, they are probably running everywhere like crazy because nothing is ready and everything is broken, but they should be able to accomplish this)
My experience is that BoM estimates tend to be inaccurate. Look at Apple kit.
There’s the cost of materials, the cost of distribution and storage, Corporate Overhead, NRE, and then the “Because We Can Get Away With It” surcharge.
The little robot was heavily inspired by Wall-E. He'll play around when he's bored. If you play music, he'll dance. And, at least for a while, they had Alexa baked in so you could "ask" Vector to do all the things Alexa does like playing music or turning off the lights.
Vector wasn't without flaws. The Alexa integration was a tad janky. And while Vector was pretty good at detecting his environment, his sensors would occasionally fail and he'd roll off the end of the desk and hit the floor. For me, this damaged the screen which made impossible to read the codes from the device necessary to sync it with services.
But there was enough there that worked to really get the vision across. After playing with Vector for a while, I believe the first in-home robot to see major success will be more of pet and less of a helper. Vector's playful personality was a key thing that made him unique. I believe that there are not technological challenges left to solve to build an amazing consumer product - it's just a matter of putting all the right pieces together to build something crazy appealing.
There are quite a few kid-targeted coding robots. I get that this has some Hugging Face integrations, but is there anything else here I’m missing that differentiates Reachy Mini?
It seems weird for a “$4.5 billion artificial intelligence platform” to be pivoting into the toy space.
The video makes it seem like a real product, the website/blog makes it seem like a collection of hardware to get started hacking on huggingface AI in combination with some basic robotics. The blog got me more excited than the video. Could be fun to tinker, and opensource hardware is cool.
Many many big words, and yet zero indication of what this robot might actually do that's useful. Unless it's primarily used as a learning/hobbyist tool -- in which case it's cool, but not going to "disrupt" anything.
A Stewart platform for a head with wobbly antennae for secondary movement is incredibly expressive!
The line between robot and animatronic is often blurred. I know there are industry definitions—or at least de facto conventions—but for me a robot is something that performs and controls "mechanical work" based on external sensing or input. For me, the output "work" isn't meant to solely be character expression.
That said, animatronics from Disney Imagineers really blur the line for me.
I'm not seeing it. A head that can move and wiggling antennas just isn't useful or even a usable interaction interface.
The vid is people waving at it, two people separately demonstrating the same demo (tracking people's hands), head bopping up and down (possibly in sync with music?) and a girl staring at it lovingly.
I was thinking the exact thing. I used to like my Nabaztags although (from the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag ) it seems it was not a commercial success.
This has me looking at the Mycroft Mark 1 (backed on Kickstarter) that's been sitting unused for years on my chest of drawers, and thinking about the Mark 2 that I backed but the order was never fulfilled as the company ran into serious issues.
In fact, I was expecting that it used Miley Cyrus voice. Nothing tells better that you are different if you are able to do that after the Scarlett Johansson case.
A camera, six 9g servos, a DC motor for the base, two microphones, a speaker and some digital glue... Maybe $25 plus the shell and assembly.
Tidy profit, even on the Lite version.
Edit: Curious to know what someone downed this for. Even from a sketchy CGI video you can see the head moves on four struts. You can do a cardboard DIY on an ESP32 for $10. Consumer robotics with sloppy tolerances are dirt cheap and I see no reason why this doesn't fit that remit.
It's a speaker + microphone + camera case with a rotate-able head that you can put a Raspberry PI inside. There's no way this will disrupt the robotics industry. It's just another toy.
As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.