Amazon’s newly announced robot Astro – first unveiled at the recent Amazon 2021 event – was presented as a helpful AI assistant who you can’t help but find a little cute. However, a new report suggests that Astro’s presence in your home could be more sinister than their outer shell would have you believe.
New information published by Vice’s Motherboard – which it claims has been sourced from leaked internal development documents and video recordings of meetings about Astro – indicates that the new all-in-one robot assistant has more than a few flaws.
According to one developer “Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity”. They went on to say that the robot’s person-detection is unreliable (making it nearly useless as a home security device) and its parts seem too fragile for their intended purposes.
This fragility would be a particular issue for the mast camera that allows Astro to scan from higher up; it has been known to lock up while extended, making it nearly impossible to ship Astro back to Amazon for repair.
Given these issues, the developer added that pushing Astro as an accessibility device is at best “nonsense” and at worst “potentially dangerous for anyone who’d actually rely on it”. According to Motherboard, other Astro developers shared similar concerns.
Adding insult to injury is Astro’s $999 (around £750 / AU$1,400) price tag – a princely sum to pay especially for a robot that might break itself. While we don’t know how recent these comments are, they’re enough to have us more than a little worried about the reliability of Amazon’s new robot. It certainly seems like everyday shoppers should wait for in-depth reviews before taking a punt on this expensive smart home machine.
Analysis: is Astro worth trading your privacy?
Even before the concerns shared by Motherboard, consumers would have been worried about Amazon Astro from a privacy perspective. It’s one thing to have an Amazon Echo in your living room, it’s another to have a device that roams around your home.
To this end, Astro will be tracking you quite a bit more than those devices and will have to store a lot of data to work effectively. As other leaked Amazon documents explain, Astro needs to create an accurate map of your home and mark out “choke points” where it is likely to bump into a human, wall or pet.
This means the robot will learn where you congregate, how you move around and will be vigilantly scanning those areas with its cameras to look out for dangers. It’ll also learn to interact with you and will store visual ID information to recognise you.
For some people this will be too much personal data to have stored on an Amazon device, and if Astro works as poorly as these leaks suggest, the risks might outweigh the rewards.
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