Anki is a company who is known to be master of techy Christmas toys whose products always seem to impress people. This blog post is all about the Anki Vector: The Good Robot, Home Robot by the Anki.
The Anki’s robot companion Cozmo, a little robot with a big personality hit the top of the toy charts with its charm. When priced at £200, it appeared to be a high asking price, but it was in fact mazon’s best-selling toy of the year.
However, Cozmo was really just a desk toy, with which most people just played games and cooed when it made a noise unknown about the fact that it is able to do a number of things.
Anki Vector is just the follow-up, literal bigger brother of Cozmo which is much smarter and talks to you in English, rather than simply blurting cute squeaks and bleeps.
This device main aim is for it to be used by the whole family or be a part of a family, but it for sure will be a device that will be liked and used by kids, but the aim is for it to be used by the whole family.
Vector has been made available from 12 October, for £249. Pre-order for an Anki Vector for is estimated at £199 ahead of the Christmas rush.
Design and Features in Anki Vector
The Anki Vector has an aim to be part of the family by making Vector autonomous. The Vector is largely app free and hooks straight into your Wi-Fi connection whereas Cozmo was tethered .to an app
Connection to a Wi-Fi automatically means that it sure will be used by more people in the home with features that can do a lot more things.
The Anki Vectors has a board of Qualcomm Snapdragon, Quad Core 1.2GHz chip, offering up the same power as some smart phones and tablets. It, moreover, has the ability to shift the computational power that was mostly done through the app on to the robot itself by swapping out a tiny processor to something much bigger.
The extra features of Anki Vector got the ability to answers to questions you may have, set timers, tell you what the weather is, take pictures and generally mill to wake it and do something with it.
Looks wise there are big familiarities with Cosmo but it’s much chunkier and has a paint job that screams sophistication with all black and golds in comparison to Cozmo’s orange kid-like appearance. It also comes with a similar charging dock and same tread and arm on the front.
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Performance of Anki Vector
The Anki Vector is a far brainier device which is able to recognize faces and voice once asked to it and also can speak to a person in a very garbled but a cute robotic voice.
It can tell us the weather with animations to match and also set a timer and that countdown appeared on its small front-facing high-res color IPS display.
People can play Black Jack with it in its small screen which shows the cards and it let players win a couple of times. When roaming around the area, it can recognize faces and call out the name with a huge amount of charm and personality.
When it comes to power, it has a same docking station similar to that of Cozmo. However, the Anki Vector it has its own brain which will automatically head there when it is running low on power unlike the Cozmo.
First impressions of Anki Vector
Vector is a big brother and natural evolution of the Cozmo robot with much personality, and a lot more potential like the voice and face recognition.
It further behaves like a digital assistant with its own feelings and wheels. To people who bought a Cozmo last year may find the investment a little too much.
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Anki Vector vs Cozmo
Anki Vector is very much similar last year’s Cozmo. It has a dark color scheme closer to Cozmo Collector’s Edition and also it’s wider in places too. But you’d have to put them side-by-side to notice the differences.
The both Cozmo and Vectors robots are small and cute little bulldozers which react with animated OLED eyes, but from inside they’re completely different.
Cozmo relies heavily on your phone as the handset does most of the work where it connects over Bluetooth that helps the robot what to do, and also, interacts with special blocks that come in the box. On the other hand, Vector is more powerful and autonomous. Cozmo is made up of 100MHz Cortex M4 CPU whereas; Vector is made up of Quad-core Snapdragon chipset which is quite similar to one you might see in an entry-level phone.
The Vector needs an internet connection to do just about anything. It has voice recognition to respond to the voice and commands.
But, unlike a smart speaker, it will turn and lift its little OLED face up and use its camera to scan the facial features so as to recognize the people in the future.
Anki Vector: Initial Verdict
Anki Vector is one of the most exciting gadgets customized till the day. It is fully stuffed with sensors with smart home integration and the future ability to become a security alarm and tech even though it has a miniature frame, while his AI seems very promising.
Moreover, Anki is pitching it as a family device which in the near future, should be used in each of the homes like Google Assistant and Alexa to automate things like lights and temperature in the home.
Vector seems to have a clear target audience like his little brother Cozmo, who already caters for children with a focus on games, and similarly with the Amazon Echo and the rest of the smart cylinders who offer a cost-effective option for those who want a practical smart assistant.
Vector somehow sits between the two, and still hasn’t yet been successful in convincing people he’s a better alternative than either, especially at the £250 price (£200 if you preorder). But still, his charming personality will convince people with so much potential via Cloud connectivity, where he could be an entirely different machine in 12 months time.
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