text stringlengths 0 1.46k |
|---|
So that could just be a part of the business... But we also have another customer that's buying them in elder care, we have another customer that's buying some units in security... And we could just support them with a common platform, so their costs are lower. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes sense, honestly... Because if you can't as a company specialize, in the same way that Apple supports computers that are high-end computers, like an iMac Pro, for example, that someone might do extreme video editing on, or large-scale CAD operations, or 3D renderings, and things like that.... |
\[20:24\] In the same way, you can think - well, rather than specializing in security, or certain areas, you can do all the smart things, which is what you do well, to build the necessary components to deal with all the problems like heat dissipation, or the different aspects of vision, or eyes, or natural language pro... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, exactly. With Coronavirus now (Covid-19), I wish we had launched Misty six months earlier, because robots have a lot of use cases with what we're going through now... From companionship, to telemedicine, telehealth, working with kids with special needs, autism, where you can't have that face-to... |
She has a face, a head that can look around, a couple arms... They're not articulated, there's no hands with fingers, or anything... Simplified arms, so she can point at things. And then a suite of sensors, for voice interaction, for mapping mobility, so she can drive around, cameras so she can see things, recognize ob... |
And we're starting to see our hypothesis working, where we would have customers buying Misty, starting to work on skills in different spaces. The two big areas that we're seeing were elder care, things like safety, companionship, and then customers in the education/therapy side. One of our pilot customers is out on the... |
So we're just sort of seeing this machine working, and with Coronavirus now a lot of these organizations need things immediately, like personal protective equipment, stuff like that... And I wish our customers had that little bit more time to get their solutions ready... But it's really exciting to see that people are ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's an interesting time, honestly... I've been watching Misty since -- mid-2018 y'all got in touch with us, and I think you were not quite at a point where it would make sense to have this kind of conversation, because you needed some... We might have been helpful to you to (I guess) get to market,... |
Some people are even putting up Christmas lights to reenact the end of 2019 to go into a new year kind of thing, just to sort of forget, because that's what we wanna do... It's terrible. It really is terrible. And maybe you could speak to launching something so crucial, that you've worked so hard on, at a time where it... |
**Ian Bernstein:** \[24:13\] Yeah, it's a little frustrating... Like I said, I wish we had shipped earlier, so that people would have had more time with Misty to develop solutions before the last month... But I think we're trying to look at it as what sort of opportunities can we take from this. Right now, a lot of our... |
**Break:** \[25:29\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's key into those specific things, because I think this idea of robots as a development platform is pretty interesting. As you'd mentioned, you were in the toyish space with Sphero, and you wanted to create "real robots" (in your own words) that were highly functional. That takes a marriage of se... |
I mean, hey, Ian, we're at a really challenging state right now; the challenging problem is obviously getting past many things that's happening in our world right now, but... I think robots as a development platform is super-interesting. We see it happening when it comes to voice, and you mentioned Alexa and Siri and o... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, the next step is -- I mean, a lot of it is just sort of exposing a lot of these pieces, more pieces to developers. Right now we're sort of at the early stages in mapping and navigation. For a robot to do that is really hard. And of course, you've seen news about autonomous vehicles, and cars, a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the price point we're talking about here? Those ranges - you've got like a couple different levels to it? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, so we have three different versions. We have a basic version that doesn't have the mapping and navigation; that starts at $2,000. Then we go up to $3,299 for the high-end version. They can map basically up to about a 2,000 sqft. space. It's still pretty crude... So we're working on basically ma... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting, to think how it has to investigate, "Oh, it's still the same room. New devices, new things, new objects in the room." Give me a peek - does it go over to the things and investigate how it can get around it to remap the room? Does it try to do that constantly, or is there maybe so... |
**Ian Bernstein:** \[31:56\] Right. It has to be enough of a match that it can sort of figure out where it is. And there's things like loop closure, which is also important... Looking to my right - I'm in my living room kitchen - there's a big island, where the sink is, a big counter, and the couch up against it. If th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** So it has to sort of rejigger the whole map in a way that works. It's just really complicated. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's hard to program. It seems as a human so easy... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...to me, as a human, because that's my perspective - I can know what I know because of what I know... Whereas with a robot, or something like this that's doing it autonomously, there's no human behind the scenes constantly giving it feedback, saying "You're correct, you're correct." It's literally ... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. Even as a human though, if you're in a bigger environment, it can get complicated. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, that's true. |
**Ian Bernstein:** If you're mapping a map where like -- I was just thinking back to when I was a kid and I played Mist... I don't know if you ever played that game. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't play Mist, no. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Or like Riven... Basically, there was all these areas, there were these sections -- I think it was like a submarine, and you were going through some underground tunnels, and it was like -- it's a puzzle game. So we ended up -- my friend and I drew these massive maps, and you're trying to figure out w... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I even think about a big building that you might go in. How often do you go into somebody's home and be like "Oh, there's more over there." You just see a hallway, it doesn't seem very deep or investigatable; it just seems like "Oh, it's just a door." Well, that's literally a door to a whole n... |
I can see how on one side I could say it's easier, but then on the other side it's definitely - you can get lost in a big building. How often do you go into a gigantic museum for a tour, or something like that, and you're like "I have no idea where I'm at"? You have no idea where you're at. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Right. Totally. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You don't have a topology map to look at it. Nothing that says "I've been here before." You rely upon those big maps to say "You are here." Hopefully it's correct. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Oh yeah, I've totally done that. Other features that we're putting in -- we didn't have streaming video and audio, bidirectional, so you could Telepresence with Misty... So we're getting people that are interested in that, especially now, when again, therapists aren't able to go into a family's home ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Colors, facial -- I saw the face on Misty II. I could see how in telehealth, or especially teletherapy, where -- I don't know... I mean, would you choose a robot in this case, with vision, or would you choose a computer with Zoom? |
**Ian Bernstein:** I think a lot of cases a computer with Zoom or a tablet or whatever is plenty... But for certain things, especially elderly, especially kids with special needs, the personality of Misty actually adds a lot. Being able to convey personality through Misty's eyes and expressions and being this real, tan... |
\[36:29\] There's a local school in Denver that has a -- they call them the Kinder Coders. Like, literally, kindergarteners coding Sphero visually. But part of their lessons where they're not doing coding, but they have this big mat on the floor with the days of the week... And a lesson would be "Using the joystick on ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, now I can see that, because with just one button push, when there's an experience that happens when you travel to space... It may not be a one-to-one, but I think about directional. If I'm driving and I go from here to there, and I've never gone from here to there, wherever that is, poin... |
So in this case where you have them actually mapping a physical object from one place to another, it's akin to that same experience, where your awareness is attached to it. Something is deeper in the learning, not just simply pushing a button. It's something very -- all I can say is your awareness and your attention is... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Whether it was you or not. It's an extension of you. It's a proxy even, of you, if you're controlling the robot with a joystick, for example. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yup. There's a lot of research talking about socially-assisted robots (they call them) in this space of special needs kids, for diagnosing and doing interventions with kids with autism. There's also a lot of research starting now on robots in the healthcare space, again, with elderly... And having th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Using robots to supplement healthcare workers, because we're starting to see shortages of workers in that space; it's only gonna get worse with aging populations in certain countries. Robots can take care of things just like a concierge, answering certain questions for people. Or if it is a person ma... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. There's no emotion. I mean, there's programmed emotion; that could be debatable, I suppose. But there's technically no emotion attached to the repetition. As a human, we get impatient. As a robot, maybe you can program patients into it, or program inpatients into it, potentially... So it's all... |
**Ian Bernstein:** \[40:00\] Yup. It was kind of interesting, you read that quote off my LinkedIn profile. That's something I've been thinking about a lot recently... I definitely wouldn't say I'm a specialist in any one thing, but I'm dangerous in a lot of things. I'm pretty good at a huge range, like -- I don't know,... |
Either they start to step on people's toes, because they like to do too many things, and they're stepping on the toes of the specialists that are the pros in whatever it is they're doing...And a lot of times the people who are good at a lot of things are actually better at those things too, but people don't perceive th... |
Right now I'm trying to help a lot of our team with different tasks that do need somebody to jump in... We didn't have a web person on our team, and we needed to launch our three skews and do some updates to our website... I'm like "Alright, I can do that. \[unintelligible 00:42:16.26\] a design company for four years.... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** A lot of roles -- it's like, you're the marketing person, or you're the salesperson... It's pretty clear what you need to do and what your goals are. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So what is it that you do day to day then? Are you a roamer? Let's break down your role at a higher-level. You're a co-founder, right? |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.