They welcomed a robot into their family, now they're mourning its death

The robot showed up at Kenneth Williams' doorstep when he needed it most. Williams had just been laid off from his job when he plugged in Jibo, a social home robot, on November 1st, 2017. "For that year [that I didn't have a job], it was a presence in my life every single day that I talked to," he says. Jibo sat in Williams' bedroom, on his desk, where every day, it greeted him in the morning and ran through the weather and his calendar. Williams, 44, asked Jibo questions, requested music, and played its games. Jibo couldn't do much, really, but its most redeeming feature, the one that cemented it as a robot darling in its owner's heart, was its facial recognition.