Amazon Wants Its Home Robot to Anticipate Your Every Need

Jeff Bezos has wanted a home robot for a long time. By 2017, Amazon's founder, an avid sci-fi fan, had repeatedly asked the company's engineers and executives about the feasibility of such a project, says Ken Kiraly, a vice president who helped create the Kindle ebook reader. That was the year Amazon's special projects team judged that it was finally the right time to begin building a home robot, due to the maturity of artificial intelligence and robotics, falling cost of sensors and computer chips, and risk that competitors had similar plans. They got started despite one big unknown: what Amazon's home robot would be good for. "Robots are hard," says Kiraly, who put together the team on the project.