Meet Kuri, the smartbot with personality of a companion

Mayfield Robotics, an independent subsidiary of appliance company Bosch, unveiled the Kuri at the Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday.

The 20-inch-tall, 12-inch-wide home robot is packed to the brim with technologies like asynchronous motors, a capacitive touch sensor, microphones, speakers, and an HD camera.

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But Kuri is a little more amiable than your average robot. It animates playfully when you call its name. It emotes audibly when instructed to perform a task. And a built-in LED changes colour to indicate its current state of mood.

Mayfield sought to build a robot that’d feel less like a piece of technology and more like a “companion” — a point Chris Matthews, Mayfield’s vice president of marketing, emphasized in a sit-down at Digital Trends’ New York office in November. “It doesn’t feel like a robot in the traditional sense. It connects to people a different way than normal tech,” Matthews said. “It’s very much about what people feel.”

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