You'll soon be able to program Cozmo, the cute little robot that could, all you like

Remember Cozmo, the cute little AI-powered robot that can recognize faces, become bored if you ignore it, or throw a tantrum when it loses a game? Turns out it's capable of far more than Anki, the San Francisco-based creators of the'bot, let on last week. On Monday, the startup announced the launch of a software development kit that will expose Cozmo's artificial intelligence smarts -- including facial recognition, positional tracking, and text-to-speech synthesis -- to any developer keen on tapping into them. Anki's motivations for doing so, explained Anki's president and co-founder Hanns Tappeiner at a showcase in New York City, are twofold. First, the company wants to distill Cozmo's deluge of mechanical parts, which include a gyroscope, accelerometer, cameras, a drop sensor, and four motorized joints, down to easy-to-understand functions that novice programmers can understand.