Roomba Would Bring Amazon One Step Closer to Rosie From The Jetsons

The Jetsons cartoon series premiered on Sept. 23, 1962, featuring the eponymous family living in the high-tech future of 2062. Most memorable, perhaps, was Rosie the Robot, the family’s android maid. And while we are still 40 years away from the period depicted in the show, we still haven’t seen anything close to Rosie 60 years after the show’s debut. This is in part because of the limitations of robotic dexterity—i.e., human hands are still better than robot hands—but also because such a robot would be far too expensive for most consumers. And so a robot maid like Rosie remains the stuff of fiction for now. Vacuum robots Then, in August, Amazon announced its intent to acquire iRobot, the tech company that manufactures the most Rosie-like robot we have today: the Roomba vacuum. According to iRobot, it has sold more than 40 million home robots since its founding in 1990. In a statement upon inking the deal, Dave Limp, svp of Amazon Devices, said, “I’m excited to work with the iRobot team to invent ways that make customers’ lives easier and more enjoyable.” More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating the deal, so it is by no means a foregone conclusion. But if it does go through, it would leave Amazon uniquely positioned in a burgeoning market. Inside the smart home One benefit is, of course, even more data. “Roomba inherently builds a map of your home and provides new vectors of lifestyle experience data to Amazon about millions of people,” said Jason Alan Snyder, global chief technology officer at the agency Momentum Worldwide. “These robots are constantly scanning the home. They map homes in detail.” But there’s more to it than that. Like smart home security company Ring, which Amazon acquired in 2018, iRobot would further entrench Amazon in the smart home—and allow it to better compete with Apple, which rules the roost with nearly 50% of the smartphone market, as well as its smart home platform, HomeKit. That’s according to Phillip Jackson, co-founder of retail media research startup Future Commerce, who added, “It's pretty apparent [Amazon’s] strategy is to reposition Alexa and other investments as smart home equipment as opposed to conversational commerce as a strategy.” More on that in a moment. 'Hey, Robot, bring me a beer' But the real end goal is likely to make Amazon a major player in home robotics. The ecommerce giant already has expertise in warehouse robots, but the home market is “totally different,” said Martin Ford, futurist and author of Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything. He noted iRobot is the biggest consumer robot company in existence because it has built a useful vacuum robot, which is pretty much the apex of home robot technology at this point. “The holy grail of home robots is you would have a servant robot that would have an arm on it and would bring you a beer from the refrigerator and tidy up your home and do all kinds of different things,” Ford said. “But the reality is that's an extraordinarily difficult technical challenge"—much less affordable. He estimates we’re at least 10 years away from an affordable home robot that could actually perform useful tasks like the Jetsons’ Rosie. But a 2022 iRobot deal would set Amazon up in this market with plenty of time to capitalize. In 2021, Amazon announced a home robot called Astro—and it recently outlined some updates, including the ability to detect cats and dogs. But Ford noted Astro still can’t do anything tangible, or manipulate objects. Roomba could change that. “They view it in much the same way they viewed the Amazon Echo and Alexa and all that,” Ford said. “This totally new market is a way to get Amazon-branded devices into your house.” Jackson, however, noted the iRobot and Roomba brands may be more palatable to consumers, who will be asked to bring yet another device into their most sacred spaces. “It certainly looks a lot better if you see Ring and an iRobot [logo] rather than Amazon on freaking everything,” he added. Next, Robot, order me some stuff Eventually, these home robots will become another way for consumers to order products—or perhaps even reorder their favorite products automatically. This, of course, was the promise of conversational commerce when Alexa-enabled devices emerged in 2014. By now, we were all supposed to be saying, “Alexa, order paper towels” to do our shopping. But that never really came to pass. That’s in part because there are not only multiple brands of products like paper towels, but also many distinctions like sizes, packaging and price. “Commerce requires multiple decision points,” Jackson said. “And if I have to clarify more than one or two questions to have my intent or my desire met, I'm not going to do it through voice because voice is a very slow communication medium.” It’s simply much easier to zero in on the product you want with a screen. “Is conversational commerce dead?” Jackson asked. “No, but I don't think the way we saw it as this Star Trek future was ever realistic.” Instead, voice is better suited for discrete actions like “Turn on my lights” or “Vacuum the floor.” Besides, smartphones are already pretty convenient for shopping, especially when compared to driving to the store. “For a lot of people, I don't think you're going to see necessarily a whole lot of value in [voice ordering]—at least not right away, because you've already got this totally amazing device that lets you do things that once would have been science fiction,” Ford said. That being said, the only constant is change—and a home robot that interacts with customers is a natural conduit for commerce. “There are all kinds of different ways [Amazon] can [encourage shopping] once they have these devices in your home,” Ford said. “I definitely think they see that market as something that has a lot of potential, exactly the same way they saw the Amazon Echo is a way to get a new device into the home.” Amazon’s Back-to-School Campaign Offers Levity in the Face of Historic Inflation