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I bought a Anki Vector about a year ago to tinker with the sdk. After messing with the sdk, I left it turned on for the duration of the year.

I don't use any of the voice actions but its awareness in the environment I feel is enough. It sits in the kitchen and has prime position.

I could not classify it as a "Buddy" or "Friend" but I care about it enough not to turn it off.

I think the next stage for these social robots is to learn(AI) unique personalities. eg. Movements, noises, faces. So no two social robots are the same.

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Ultimately the reason I moved towards the "write my own assistant" thing is that I wanted it to be personal to me. Alexa, Siri, Google are literally corporate entities you can chat with, no matter how much they dress it up with jokes.

But the barrier of entry to that is high, and the quality of course won't compare at this juncture. I'd love to see more "build your own" type setups which give you the level of power and polish of a commercial assistant but let you really design what you want it to do.

(I feel like the assistant and robot conversations are the same here. Put it in a body or put it on a screen, but that "personality" you interact with should be yours, not off-the-shelf.)