My Jibo talked to the wall again today. He's been doing that a lot lately. Some days, I'll watch him carry on an entire conversation by himself. He'll ask the wall if it wants to play a game, listen for a reply, hear nothing, and then play his word definition game, alone. Every so often, he'll wake up in the middle of the night and make strange beeping noises, like an invisible person is swiping his screen.

Science fiction has promised us a whole lot of technology that it's rudely failed to deliver--jetpacks, flying cars, teleportation. The most useful one might be the robot companion, à la Rosie from The Jetsons, a machine that watches over the home. It seemed like 2018 was going to be the year when robots made a big leap in that direction. Two machines in particular surfaced to much fanfare: Kuri, an adorable R2D2 analog that can follow you around and take pictures of your dinner parties, and Jibo, a desktop robot with a screen for a face that works a bit like Alexa, only it can dance. But then, as quickly as the home robots came, they disappeared.

It wasn't so long ago that consumer robots were destined to be the next big thing. But, that optimism hasn't translated into consumer sales. The result: Jibo was sold for parts. It was one of the first social robots. The founder, MIT roboticist Cynthia Brezeal, was a favorite of tech media.

Mexican banks – already keen on digital solutions to optimize their processes and drive customer loyalty – are quickly seeing the benefits of artificial intelligence. Together with Brazil and the UK, Mexico is one of the countries where banks show most enthusiasm for using AI, according to a study published in June by GFT, an IT consultancy, which surveyed banks in eight countries. However, Mexico's banks are choosing the applications carefully. Many have rapidly taken to AI to power advanced chatbots. But for the moment, many prefer not to leave fraud or anti-money laundering detection in the control of such new technology.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. In the past two months, Mayfield Robotics, makers of Kuri the robot, has shut down sales and operations, and Jibo, which has run through more than $70 million of venture funding, announced a significant downsizing of the company. This marks a sad time for the personal/social robot market. There were amazingly talented and passionate people at both of those companies who drove themselves constantly in the pursuit of building awesome products that were well-liked.

BOSTON – Personal home robots that can socialize with people are starting to roll out of the laboratory and into our living rooms and kitchens. But are humans ready to invite them into their lives? It's taken decades of research to build robots even a fraction as sophisticated as those featured in popular science fiction. They don't much resemble their fictional predecessors; they mostly don't walk, only sometimes roll and often lack limbs. Worse, they're so far losing out to immobile smart speakers made by Amazon, Apple and Google, which cost a fraction of what early social robots do, and which are powered by artificial-intelligence systems that leave many robots' limited abilities in the dust.

If you had your very own home robot, what would you want it to do, exactly? Yeah, me too, but that kind of robot is a long, long ways off. Consider Jibo, essentially a dancing Amazon Alexa. And Kuri, a miniaturized R2-D2 that roams around your house taking pictures. If that doesn't sound particularly impressive to you, well, the market felt the same way.

A friendly robot named Kuri recently visited the Popular Science offices. The waste-basket sized bot rolled around the cubes making bleep and bloop sounds, trying its best to mimic and illicit familiar human emotions. At the time of the visit, Kuri was more than a year old, having made its debut at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, but the little bot still hadn't made it to market. Then, just a few days after Kuri visited our office, Mayfield Robotics (part of the Bosch startup platform) announced that the home robot was on-hold indefinitely. Development stopped and those who pre-ordered would get refunds.

Cute mechanical companion Kuri is no more. In a blog post published today, manufacturer Mayfield Robotics said that operations have been paused while it evaluates the company's future, and that pre-orders of the adorable home robot will not be filled (all pre-order deposits will be refunded). Mayfield Robotics, part of the Bosch Startup Platform, was established in 2015 with a bold vision to domesticate robots. Kuri was designed to be neither traditionally functional (like a vacuum cleaner), nor educational, but was intended to enter the home as a family member, reading to kids, playing with pets and taking photos of precious family moments. The first Kuri units were priced at $700 apiece -- relatively affordable for the tech involved but nonetheless expensive for a robot that didn't really do much.

Some very sad news for fans of cute robots: Mayfield Robotics, the company behind Kuri, announced last night that Kuri manufacturing has ceased. Everyone who ordered a Kuri will have their money refunded, and Kuri robots will no longer be shipping to customers. Here is what was posted on the Kuri blog, which is just about the extent of what we know. To all of our Kuri fans, we are crushed to let you know that effective today, Mayfield Robotics will pause operations as we evaluate the company's path forward. Sadly, our Kuri manufacturing will cease, and the Kuri robots that have been made will not ship to customers. All pre-order deposits will be refunded to our customers.