 Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE coverage here at Remarch, Amazon Remarch, stands for Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space, and we're here for a robotics school segment. So we have Moxie on the desk. We've got Caitlyn Claybaugh, head of HRI. Welcome to theCUBE, and follow Virginia, founder and CEO of Moxie. Thanks for coming on, and thanks for bringing this special third guest onto theCUBE. Thank you for having us. This is exciting. Okay, so first of all, we'll get into the company a second, but what is this, what is, what's going on? Amazing. This is Moxie. This is our first product out of embodied, and it is a social-emotional learning AI friend for children. Ages five to 10, currently. That's why she likes me. Yes. She's staring at me right now. I'm a child. Thank you, nice to see you. And it has all sorts of content and multi-back and forth interaction, and it's our first pass at doing social- Okay, so this product is shipping? It is shipping. Yeah. It is available. We've been out for over a year now, shipping for over a year now. Oh man, it just makes me feel good. It must be a big seller across all use cases. So what's the number one thing you guys getting attention on right now for Moxie? Besides the cool factor, the tech, what's going on? Well, I think we have received a lot of interest from many people because Moxie's captured the imagination of people in terms of what is possible in the future. And really, the genesis of it is that I've been doing robotics for 20 years and sort of a little bit disappointed with what we have accomplished in robotics because there's so much work we can do. We have dreamt about robots for centuries, but what we were dreaming about was not robotic vacuum cleaners, which Guilty has charged. I was a CTO at iRobot. And we want to see robots that actually can really care for us from childhood to retirement. And Moxie represents the AI technology we have developed that's going to make that next wave of robotics to flourish. You must be really excited because I think right now one of the main walk away themes so far from this show is technology is not the blocker anymore. It's the people, human side of it, where it used to be technology's slow. And robotics has been that area where we've seen great innovation, but where's that needle moving moment coming? I think now with cloud and all the things happening seems to be the moment. I think we are seeing exponential growth in technology that's going to enable robots to become unreal. As an example, Moxie uses very advanced conversational engine where you literally can't talk to Moxie about anything you want. So it can be a real companion. It will understand you, understand your needs and emotions and start working on social emotional development for children. This technology, which are known as transformer models, deep neural networks that are trained on millions of conversation, we are seeing every year 10X improvement to this. So I predict in the next two to three years, you will be able to have a conversation with Moxie that's like having a subject expert, matter expert in every single subject. Yeah, yeah. That's like getting a cube interview like instantly. Hey, Moxie, what's the information? So I can see the tie in and it's just, my mind's blown, I guess, in the sense of the use cases are wide. You had wide-ranging use cases, elderly care, child development, loneliness, all kinds of social emotional factors. Yeah, we've built a really incredible platform that we're hoping to expand out beyond kids. I mean, kids is kind of our, this is our first product, but Moxie, the fact that we have what we call our social X platform and the tools where you can create content and Moxie can have conversations about any number of things. So share what's with technologies under the covers here with human robotic interface kind of dynamic. You've got software, you've got hardware, you're going to have code, you've got the neural networks. It's kind of the confidence of a lot of different vectors coming together. What's the secret sauce? So that's what we call our social X platform. And really, you're right. Everything has to work in concert and at a price point that's affordable for people. So Moxie's able to actually track people in the real world and we are able to fuse people's speech and we do facial recognition for the specific child so Moxie knows its mentor and personalize the interaction over time. Well, she's talking to me or he is that she is a gender-neutral robot, I guess, whatever I want it to be, I guess. We've left it intentionally gender-neutral but kids kind of prescribe whatever gender they feel connected. It's good, it enables the user. Yes. Really the key. What's been the biggest use case that you didn't think would be coming to the table with Moxie? Anything surprise you? You must get a lot of reactions. Yeah, so you covered some of the ones we are focused on. We are particularly focused on mental health from childhood to retirement and aging gracefully. After we launched Moxie, we had a TikTok video that went crazy viral. We got 40 million views on this and that led to a lot of interest from celebrities, from some of the most luxury hotel chains that have reached out to us and they want to use the technology in Moxie to develop a personal butler for every guest room as an example. That's one example, right? So we have one of the largest violence intervention program in the US that caters to children that have unfortunately been through very traumatic experiences in their life and want to use Moxie as a way to provide therapy to these children. So the use cases are very broad. We even have people from different countries that were very interested in using Moxie for instance teaching a Chinese child how to speak English, immersively by interacting with Moxie, which is the best way to learn a different language. So I think the implications of this are paramount. We will even see in contact sensors, centers, customer support centers and so on we'll use technology like this for having an empathetic AI that's actually taking care of your customer service complaints rather than a robotic way of interacting. I was just on earlier with an interview here with Deloitte and AWS on conversational AI and trust was a big conversation. Trust and ethics. So you got ethics, trust, bias, all these things are factors. You got human interaction with physical and then software standpoint. What are the hard problems are in here that you guys have solved? Like come on, this is incredible. Because these are hard problems. Yes they are. And one of them is the famous cocktail party problem and Palo being our fearless CEO really drove the team to get Moxie to this state where Moxie's able to interact with people even in this environment which is pretty incredible and lock in and have a back and forth conversation. It's very exciting. So Moxie how do you feel? You feeling good? What's the biggest challenge you've had here? Audio? Congratulations, this is really impressive. I'm so impressed. And again it's not to oversimplify it. There's a lot of hard problems going on here that are being solved. Absolutely there are so many. Interaction? You got a physical device. Exactly, it's a physical device and like how we have designed Moxie down to the color of Moxie's eyes, the color of the shell. All of that has taken a lot of iteration to get to a point where we really have a robot that people feel like they can trust, feel like they can connect with. And even something to add to this is that we have many robots that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Because it's very easy to keep adding more sensors and more compute power and so on. You end up with robots that cost 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars. One of the goals we set at the outset was we want to make Moxie as affordable as an iPhone. So and Moxie is, right? The price point of Moxie is same as owning an iPhone. You pay about a thousand dollars upfront plus a monthly subscription fee. And that was not easy. Can I upgrade the RAM? Can I upgrade the RAM on that too? We have very limited RAM, we have very limited RAM. If you can convince them. iPhone, I can always get the 256, so the one carabyte. Right. No, it really actually makes it much harder to develop technology that's affordable for it. Yeah, yeah, totally. And we wanted to do that because we wanted to have impact. So are you shipping now or are you on allocation? I can imagine the demand is off the charts. Definitely. We sold out last year when we launched the product. Now we are resolving supply chain issues that everyone is suffering from due to COVID. And this year we'll have better ability to meet demand. So this is the people want it. There's a lot of demand. Right. You guys are smiling, having fun. Yes. All right, so now talking about the product. Take me through the product. What's the challenges here? Obviously the animation and the camera. I see the camera. I see some lights there, heart, speaker. What would Moxie be doing if we weren't here if we were at home? So as in interacting with a child at home. We've seen a lot of people actually put Moxie on the floor and kids will like lay down in an Iraq with Moxie. And there are a lot of different activities. Right now it's doing a little jukebox dance. But there are more kind of therapy or mental health and social emotional learning driven content. Like children can read a book with Moxie and we use the screen not just to show that great cute facial expression in the eye contact, but we also can show icons and some additional information. And so in this way we've created a very new type of interface for a machine with a child. Not to get all product visionary and roadmap oriented here, but I can imagine interfacing out to third party screens in the future where this is going to stay compact and affordable. And if I'm interacting and I want to display a visual, is that something you guys, you guys going beyond that you're still focused on the product here? What's something on the vision you have there? Definitely there will be versions of our SocialX platform finding their way into what we may call the metaverse where you could have hyper realistic models of humans driven by our AI to interact with you the way you and I are interacting. But embodiment where the name of the company is derived from is actually super important in the kind of things we are doing with mental health and social emotional development because the physical co-presence of an entity like this interacts with our brains in a different way than when we do on a screen. So there's going to be both versions. For some applications will be virtual, other applications will be physical. That's a wait and see, see what happens. Sell out the next batch inventory, work on the product. And the embodiment it does, it hits a little different. Kids will actually physically tuck Moxie in at night. There's something there that's tangible. I think it's great, home run. I mean, just having the response, the visual response, the facial makes an impact instantly. So you can extend that out, probably make it more immersive, whether it's metaverse or within your home. Yeah, and now with AR VR goggles, where you get this 3D immersive experience, it may get closer to the impact we can have with an embodied agency. So the lines are blurring, obviously, between the physical and the digital. Well, great to have you guys on. Thanks for bringing the Moxie on, Moxie to come on. This event kind of symbolizes this revolution. We're seeing a robotics industrial shift. Space is a good example of one, this is another. Machine learning, the software business cloud, all great force multipliers to enable value creation. Where do you guys see this going, RIMAR is this whole intersection? You got a lot of different disciplines coming together. We're saying here in the Hube, and we're talking to folks that we think it's going to be a needle-moving moment for the industrial era. What's your guys take on this? Absolutely, I mean, robotics has always been right around the corner, but with the advances of technology in the last 10 years or so, this is now really possible, and it's growing at exponential rates. So the future is exciting. Obviously, we have to guide it. You talked about ethics, so being ethical about it, being mindful about how we want to deploy these technologies to actually have positive impact on us. For instance, we do not believe in replacing human labor or the need for humans, but we believe in augmenting humans, right? And technology today can actually do that. You know, that whole argument has been debunked for a decade, the whole bank teller, oh, they're going to put tellers out of business. No, there's more tellers now than ever before, so I think technology is going to create much greater aperture of opportunities. And I think the question I'd love to get you guys to share is this is going to wake up a lot of generational young talent to come into the workforce. Because the problems are there. It's not a technology, it's a human mind, what creative problem now, it's more of, you know, you're going to see robotics probably being accelerated even more than it is. It's still growing. Young kids love robotics. I mean, it's incredible to see the breadth of applications of robotics at this event specifically, and just, I don't know, getting into it. I mean, I haven't been in it as long as you, Paolo, but five, 10 years ago, you wouldn't have seen, I mean, this just wouldn't be possible. The robotics clubs are more popular now in most high schools in the United States than some sports. There's an A and a B team, and people get cut from the B team. There's so much demand, there's so much excitement because it's building, you get your hands on, and it's got software, it's got coding, it's got building. Absolutely, and you're creating, there are figures like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk that are inspiring children to go into STEM education and really build a career in that area, which is much more exciting than the opposite. Great, what do you guys think about RIMARS this year? What's your walk away? What's the big story here besides Moxie, because we recovered that right now? What's the trend? What's the high level? What's the most important story people should pay attention to? I think we're just going to see robotics or machine learning, and we're just going to see it in almost every application, and it's going to be, the word was ambient was being used during the keynote, and I think that's really true, ambient intelligence, like having robots in your everyday life, as well as just AI in your everyday life, and it's going to feel seamless. It's pretty impressive. Pablo, what's your take on the big story? I would say one of the trends we are seeing even here at AWS, Amazon, RIMARS is making machines more human. Even Astro, the product that was launched last September, I believe, by Amazon, is adding a lot of facial affect, emotions, and understanding of humans. For decades, we have been bound to using keyboards, and touch screens, and clicks here and there, and it's going to change. It's time for machines to learn to understand us, and that is going to be a trend that we will see even in the self-driving cars, which are not going to have a steering wheel, but the machine will understand our mood, and drive accordingly. Yeah, and you know, Pablo, you guys are doing, Caitlin, your work here, I think highlights what I'm seeing as, it's a future theme that's positive. It has a vibe of like, we need the good to come. You know, it's like, when's the good going to happen? And I think- I think we're all ready for that. The themes here, though, they're very positive, forward-thinking, practical, engineered, you know, and solving problems, real problems. The climate change in the keynote, we talked about healthcare and having things be solved this way. This is the new normal, it's a human problem now to solve. It is, and I think we are all, all of us are a bit more aware of that after the pandemic, because pandemic was hard on everyone in different ways, and we are more mindful of the positive, right? We are looking for something positive, and hopefully, coming out of the pandemic, now we have a global crisis, but these technologies will transform life and the world in a positive way. Yeah, you guys doing a great job. Congratulations on the success of Moxie. Thank you. At great work. Thanks for sharing that. I want to let them on platform, maybe next time we'll have a conversation, we'll tell you what the platform, it gets you a season in detail, so, but thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate the problem. Our pleasure. Okay, it's theCUBE's coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon Remars. I'm John Furrier, stay with us for more coverage after this short break.