A cute, robotic language tutor called Musio, has made it from crowdfunding campaign to full-fledged product with a debut in stores this week in Japan. Priced at JPY 98,000 (about US $900), Musio is now sold online through SoftBank's marketplace and Amazon Japan, and through a handful of brick-and-mortars stores. Musio's parent company, AI venture AKA Study, is the latest startup from Raymond Jung, a co-founder of the massively successful test-prep venture, Hackers Education Group, in South Korea. AKA employs about 50 full-time today, with most in Seoul, and a small office in Santa Monica, Calif. Technically, the company is headquartered in the U.S., but it's not making any consumer electronics for the American market yet.

It may not quite be the robot assistant the Jetsons promised us, but a new $99 robot aims to help users around the home - and try and become their friend. Called Musio, the Android powered robot can even help owners through a tough day by giving them a hug,. It also learns over time, as its creators say it will become more and more useful. Called Musio, the Android powered robot can learn its owners preferences, helping them with everything from email to keeping an apartment cool. 'Musio is an artificially intelligent (A.I.) robot designed to learn, adapt and grow with you,' its creators say. 'The more you use Musio, the smarter it becomes.'

Typically it would go here," says Bradsher. And when the language engine sputters, Musio can always rely on a joke to keep the conversation flowing. "Initially our goal should be maybe to give them fun, rather than just complete sentences and the perfect response," Shin says. True to form, Musio introduces himself with a crowdpleaser. "I can talk, tell a joke and communicate with other things," Musio says, pausing with a comic's timing before adding, "Wait I can do this too." He then lets out a flatulent sound for a solid 2 seconds, because kids may want a "smart" toy, but never at the expense of fun.

The world's first artificially intelligent robot, designed to engage and grow with you.

Over the past months since we announced Musio on Indigogo, we have gotten quite a lot of attention and interest in Musio. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has backed us during our successful Indigogo campaign as it wouldn't have been a success without you. We are really looking forward to delivering Musio to you and also everyone who took the opportunity to pre-order Musio from our website. If you are still wondering whether you should get one or not, head down to our website and preorder your very own Musio as all pre-orders will be stopped on the 31st of May! This will allow us to focus on production and delivering all Musio robots to everyone.

AKA Intelligence recently started a crowdfunding campaign for a robot built atop their Muse Artificial Intelligence project. Musio is aimed at not only normalizing conversation with AI but also has a goal to offer educational assistance to those that cannot afford human tutors. Anthony talked to a member of the AKA team on the linguistics programming side. TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

Everyone that isn't a native speaker has grammatical and pronunciation errors. Musio has a smart analysis system that corrects inaccurate pronunciations. Boost your language abilities with our very own mobile app. It is natural to have a bad pronunciation when you're not a native speaker. Musio well guide you to have a more accurate English pronunciation.

It was always the intention of creating Musio to be a robot with a high level of English to help kids and adults practice their English language skills. Musio's English is second to none which makes Musio an amazing talking companion. One of the features Musio has is the ability to fix any grammatical mistakes someone might have. If you aren't sure if something is correct, you can ask Musio for a suggestion. This is achieved using a combination of advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithms, thanks to MUSE, a deep learning based A.I quantum engine for communication.