I do so love an Aido update. They always manage to combine the maximum amount of space-filling hand-waving with the minimum amount of useful content.
In this month's exciting 43-page installment, fully half of it is what appears to be part of the poorly-written user's manual about how to customise Aido's behaviours. This follows Ingen's usual habit of slapping in anything they happen to have lying around to pad out their reports.
But don't get your hopes up - this behaviour customisation is not exactly artificial intelligence. It's obviously just LlamaLab's Automate app running on the Samsung Galaxy Tab that Aido uses for a face. R2-D2 it's not. It can play the face animations and trigger sounds but it doesn't appear to have any link to, say, Aido's alleged ability to move around.
Talking of mobility, Ingen's story is getting even more convoluted. The original ball-bot design was called into question in Ingen's StartEngine cash-grab where it wrote "
Aido will have four points of contact for the mobility mechanism and Aido does not balance on a single ball - the images above are for representational purposes only." Yet in this latest update apparently the ball-bot is totally back on and they'll soon be releasing the models and simulations for how it will work. But strangely still no video because, apparently, pointing a phone's camera at your amazing robot while it trundles around a room requires "considerable time and effort". Maybe it's shy?
Instead, in a couple of months they are going to have (nearly) five live product reviews to selected (nameless) tech journalists from leading (unnamed) magazines in San Francisco and New York!!! So you'll have to wait until March to see if the thing can even move. Which is also when delivery's been pushed back to.
So what's missing? Any information about manufacturing. After all, if they're shipping in March they're going to have to start cranking them out of the factory pretty soon. Also missing are any photos of a real Aido or a single component of it - it's just the same tired renders they've shown over and over again. Also curious by its absence is any feedback from or even mention of the alleged developers who allegedly paid to allegedly have access to the alleged SDK for allegedly months now.
Hands up who thinks this will actually ship in March?
ここには何もないようです