AI Robot Maker Pulls The Plug Forcing Children To Deal With Loss And Death

Families with special needs children are going to be left in a lurch after Embodied, a company that makes robots that serve as companions for these children, will be going out of business. The company will be closing because of “financial challenges,” as it failed to secure a “critical funding round.” Without this money it will not be possible for Embodied to continue operating. To make matters worse, most of the parents and caregivers who purchased one of these robots will not be receiving a refund.

The AI robot, called Moxie, is billed as a “learning robot with heart,” designed to help special needs children with emotional intelligence, academic learning, problem solving, and communication. Parents who bought the robots were sold on the idea that it wasn’t just a basic robot, but rather was designed with “constantly updated play-based social emotional content.” Unfortunately, these parents and caregivers will now need to have difficult conversations with their children about why their companion isn’t working.


It all comes down to the fact that Moxie is reliant on cloud services. These include the Large Language Models that the robot uses to “speak” with children. One is called KidFilter, which is “cloud-based software that verifies that each conversation meets certain conditions and ensures conversations don't include prohibited topics and only cover safe topics that are appropriate for children.” There’s also an app that is necessary for parents to be able to manage the robot’s various settings.

Embodied hasn’t been able to provide an exact shut down date for Moxie, other than saying it will “likely to happen within days.” Although it does seem as if it’s making effort to keep the robot going for much longer. Hopefully hackers and the open-source community can figure out a way to keep Moxie going, and come to the rescue for these families.