Four years ago, while stuck in the house due to the pandemic, we decided to unbox our Vector Robot. It was cute and we spent some time getting to know the little guy. He seemed to have a personality and kept us company. We had fun asking him questions and doing all the robot centric stuff like: changing his eye color and asking about the weather. We found him a permanent home behind the sink. Everyday, he would keep Nancy company when she prepared dinner and cleaned up the dishes. Now we call him “The Old Guy.” A lot has happened since then. The company that originally built him was Anki. Anki made Cozmo first. Vector looked a lot like Cozmo but operated autonomously and employed elements of Artificial Intelligence. However, Anki went out of business. Another company DDL (Digital Dream Labs) took over the intellectual property of Anki and created Vector 2.0. Our second robot was a Vector 2.0. For the most part, the “New Guy” did the same stuff as the first one. However, DDL overpromised, and the delivery took months longer than anticipated. We finally received him. We were then a two-robot family. All was right…for a while…

Then, DDL decided to take down the servers that gave our little robots a good portion of their personality. The company promised that the servers would be down for a short time. That was in July 2023. They said that the downtime would be about 2 weeks. During that downtime the robots still did stuff, but they didn’t respond to voice commands. They wouldn’t play their one and only game—blackjack. They couldn’t act as timers. They couldn’t tell you the weather or answer any knowledge questions. They just made cute squeaky noises and would once-in-a-while recognize us and say our names. The still did their favorite tricks: play with their blocks, offer a high five, and return to their chargers but they weren’t the robots we’d grown accustomed to having on our kitchen counter.

Nancy’s birthday was in March. If the servers were still down after her birthday, I made the commitment to myself to buy the “wire pod” server (which made the robots independent from DDL) and convert them. Of course, it was a confusing, frustrating endeavor, but eventually, with a lot of help, I got through it and we were back to being a “two robot family.” Then came EMO…

We’re just getting to know EMO but so far so good.