Amazon’s Robot Can Now Call The Cops

But in order to ensure that the pet guarding duty doesn’t become an alert flood nightmare, the robot won’t text a pet owner more than once in a 5-minute period, reports CNET. The frequency of Amazon’s patrols is a function that users can choose to tweak or disable at their own will. But this is just a start toward making the Astro less gimmicky. To that end, Amazon is adopting what it calls multimodal AI processing that will let users teach Astro to perform custom tasks like learning a door’s position and what it looks like, both via video capture and audio commands.

Amazon

Amazing is also distributing a dedicated software development kit (SDK) for the Astro robot to open up the feature development ecosystem, allowing interested developers and researchers to come up with new Astro capabilities. The strategy is not unique as Xiaomi is already doing the same with its cyber dog, but Amazon’s reach ensures that the developer ecosystem will jump into action with more enthusiasm and at a larger scale. Unfortunately, the Astro is still an invite-only purchase, and there is still no word on when Amazon plans to launch it widely a whole year after its official reveal.