Overview
- Familiar Machines & Magic, introduced Monday at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference, showcased a four‑legged “Familiar” built for social interaction.
- The prototype has 23 degrees of freedom, a plush touch‑sensitive coat, cameras and microphones, and it runs a small multimodal model on the device to cut latency and keep data local.
- Designed as a companion rather than a helper, it uses pet‑like sounds instead of human speech and learns household language, routines, and emotional cues over time.
- Colin Angle described the debut as a technology preview with no price or ship date, and he has said sales could begin as soon as next year with an upfront purchase and a subscription.
- The 40‑person Woburn startup draws on iRobot, Disney Research, MIT and Boston Dynamics veterans as it pursues consumer physical AI in a market marked by past social‑robot failures and Sony’s limited Aibo niche.