Jibo Is Like Alexa and a Puppy Inside One Adorable Robot

If you ask, Alexa can tell you a joke and Siri will recite a haiku. Jibo will do that, and more: the new home robot can sense when you're feeling down and try to make you smile. Cynthia Breazeal, a social robotics expert at MIT, designed the 749 bot to exhibit something approaching empathy. It isn't the first--Pepper, a humanoid robot from Softbank, does the same thing and arrives in the US later this year. But Pepper started in customer service and was adapted to home use. The oversized head is a bit too big for its body, like a puppy.