Kiki is a hungry, dancing pet robot debuting at CES 2019

[MUSIC] Hello CNET fans, welcome back to our live coverage of CES 2019. I'm Bridget Kerry. Robotic pets have been a trend for a while now. Of course, with Sony's Aibo pup which we saw earlier today. And now, here to show us the AI powered Kiki, is [UNKNOWN] and [UNKNOWN] So thank you for joining us. And I'm so excited to meet a new robot pet companion. Yeah, really excited to be here. All right, so tell us about what we're seeing here cuz this looks like a little kitty cat. Okay, so this is Kiki. Kiki is a adorable and delightful little companion pet robot. And it loves to have fun and it'll love you back. So Kiki is actually powered by a personality engine, that all Kiki"s start off being the same, but as time goes on every user interaction will effect how Kiki's personality is going to develop. And every user will have their unique journey with Kiki. So when you say it's going to learn over time, I guess if I'm happy about some things or angry with some things it will know that? Right, so Kiki has camera and audio and Kiki can understand how the user is feeling via facial expressions. And I'll do sentiment. So, if the Kiki's personality is to make the user smile a lot, Kiki will try to discover what kind of actions will actually give Kiki good feedback of seeing the user smiling and then Kiki will try to optimize for that. And can it know the difference between different people in the house? Yeah, so Kiki automatically clusters faces in the background, so Kiki will grow to learn as parent and then learn all the differences between a stranger and acquiatance. Okay. All the cameras all on the nose here? Right, the camera is right here in the nose. I see the animated eyes are giving it a little bit of personality. Yeah, take me through a demo. Yeah, so here's Kiki and he loves to see faces and as you can see now he's there looking at you. Hello. Let's see, maybe let's see if we can get the camera. Let's cover the nose. [LAUGH] The lights are kind of bright here. He's just looking around, I know CES is a big place. I said it was he, is it a he or she, or does it matter. We all have different thinkings, I think it's a he, but [UNKNOWN] thinks it's a she [UNKNOWN] [LAUGH] Yeah. [UNKNOWN] has their own purposes. So, would you just sit this on a countertop and play games? What would be the purpose? Yeah, so the purpose is that it's a pet companion that you take care of it just like a normal pet, but with a robotic spin to it. For example, you can feed Kiki, and- You can feed the robot? Right, you can feed the robot. And All right, so there's an app you have here. Right, there's an app. And the way you feed Kiki is not by giving it food. It's actually by drawing. So you feed it delicious food through the app, so- That looks like a cherry or something. We'll see what Kiki thinks. All right, keep feeding it. Apple. [SOUND] [LAUGH] I think it thought it was an apple. That's an apple, yeah. So Kiki talks? Yeah, Kiki talks, so Kiki actually learn from doodles, that's from over 50 million drawings. And then he can recognize using deep learning, what kind of drawings you're feeding. So any kind of food, you can draw? Yes, you wanna give it a try? Give it a try. All right. Let's see. What should I feed it. I don't know. Do you eat butterflies? Let's see. [BLANK_AUDIO] Fan. It did not like. It thought it was a fan. It thought it was a fan. Wow, I need to do better at my finger drawing. I'm sorry Kiki. So you have this like background of knowledge of like different doodles I guess? Right. So Kiki has a whole lot of input that's all using deep learning. And we think that as the robotic trend is going where we have a huge number of input going into the robot all using deep learning. What's the most important is that the robot needs to learn how to make decisions, what to do with this is input. So that's why I want to demo a personality engine of Kiki so it's right here So let' see, what are we looking at here? So we're looking at this engineering tool that's kind of giving us a unique sneak peek into the brain of Kiki. Now we can see that every Kiki has their own unique set of needs and wants. So this Kiki wants to have interactions, and he also wants to have food. So, and then here, the spider chart is Kiki's personality. As we can see, he's very open. Yeah, the openess level is pretty high. Right, so he's very agreeable as well. So we can just-- Not very neurotic. Yeah, he's not very neurotic. So we modeled this after a dog-like character. So this is a tool that we used to develop different personalities of Kiki And we can even change it so that the Kiki will immediately have a different personality. But, in real life, when the user is interacting with Kiki, the Kiki will slowly grow into different personalities. Well, what other ways can I interact with Kiki, besides the tablet? I mean, are there Voice commands, sensors, like what are you working on for interaction? So Kiki has the whole body is covered in touch sensors, so you can pet Kiki like anywhere you want. Anywhere? Yeah, and you can even tap the nose. Like right here, yeah he didn't like that. [LAUGH] I think I heard a little, And you can hold him by the cheeks, and he'll wiggle his **** a little bit. [LAUGH] And Kiki also likes, Like Kiki [UNKNOWN]? Kiki sometimes, he has some favorite petting spots, that every Kiki is different And if you manage to find the [UNKNOWN] spot, KIKI will like really like it and then try to celebrate. I'm sorry. He really liked that one. Now he's trying to dance. [UNKNOWN] dance. [UNKNOWN] Is KIKI dancing? Yeah, he's dancing. I hear music really faintly coming out of it. I know it's loud at [UNKNOWN]. Just doing a little. Yeah, he's trying to do a little, yeah. A little wiggle. Wiggle here, and- So how long have you been working on Kiki? So we started in June 2017, so it's been a year and a half. And what do you hope to get out of this show? Do you wanna take it to a new step? Is this something that people might be able to buy at a certain point? Yeah, we're hoping to come up as a product with Kiki so that everyone can adopt their own Kiki and then become Kiki parent. [LAUGH] What do you guys think of right now the space of companion robots? Because Some of them are rolling on the floor, some of them are doing facial recognition. What do you see right now in the evolution of this space because it is still very new. Some of that have been out already like the Jibo didn't see a lot of success because they do get up in price but where do see see Kiki fitting in? There will be lots of robots you have in your home, and Kiki is going to be one of those that will kinda be a companion. We were trying to develop this personality engine. So it's going to figure out what you like. We want everyone to kind of, we think that robots are not just for things like shipping your packages or, it's also for things like giving you some entertainment and helping you just kick back and relax a little bit. Yeah, we grew up with a dream of having a little companion next to our side, and now AI and robotics can finally merge together, where the hardware is advanced and cheap enough to be affordable. And also, there is powerful processor that we can run a lot of deep learning locally on board. And then on the software, there is a lot of deep learning inputs that can help the robot to be truly aware of the world and understand humans. So we think the decision-making, which is the engine that ties the input and output together is extremely important. And there's a lot of companies that are working on, improving the IQ of robots and we want to make sure that when people are interacting with robots they're interacting lovable characters because we love robots, because we love characters, and we love stories. So, instead of interacting with code machines, so we want to focus on elevating the IQ of robots. And as a lot of great companies they are trying to turn almost our entire house or entire office into a giant robot, we think there will be a place for a companion robot to fit. Yeah. And [UNKNOWN] So, for a long time, people have been trying to figure out, okay how can you make the robot move so nicely? And IBOT does a great job of that, and so many other companies as well. But now we're also getting all these inputs through perceptions. Now we need something in between to decide what do you do next. And we realize that you can't just put simple rules to that. You need to have millions of rules. So now we want to actually learn those rules, so it decided, okay, I see this, I know this is the right thing to do. It has aware of the context now.>> Well we have to go but really quick pull out the. This one on the stage is a prototype but this as you say is a little more polished, right? Right. This one we just recieved from our manufacturing partner last week and we are really excited to show this week at CNet. So this one, as you can see is a lot smaller, and even cuter. And then we added features like the lights on the body to make it even cooler, and this is going to be closer to the real product. And then we hope to bring them to you sometime soon. Very cool. We look forward to hearing more about KiKi. So thank you so much Mita and Jitu. Today we are