Amazon Astro review: impressive autonomous navigation skills, reasonable price for the tech, attractive design, but its daily utility is questionable
In a two-week trial, Astro was surprisingly endearing and avoided hazards such as pets and stairs. But I still don't know what I'd do with one.
Fast CompanyCarolina Milanesi
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon introduced Astro through an invite-only program as a $1,000 roaming device built around an Echo Show-like display. The review makes recurring household value—not its ability to move around—the central test of that initial home-robot proposition.
The launch also arrived alongside reporting on facial recognition and a “Sentry” mode, so buyers must weigh a mobile camera’s purpose against its privacy implications as well as its hardware capability.
First-order effects
Prospective Astro buyers get evidence that its navigation can handle common home hazards, but not a clear recurring task that justifies adding another connected device to the home.
Amazon gains validation for Astro’s mobility and design while facing an immediate product-definition problem: turning autonomous movement into a use case people will use daily.
Privacy concerns around Astro’s monitoring features make a security-oriented pitch harder to separate from the question of whether a mobile camera is wanted inside the home.
Third-order effects
If home robots continue to be judged on repeatable tasks rather than navigation alone, the category will favor devices that can show a low cost per useful check, not merely impressive autonomy.
Amazon’s later effort to sell Astro as a small-business security robot, followed by its decision to end Astro for Business and focus on the home version, suggests the product’s long-term market is being narrowed through use-case testing rather than broad robot adoption.
The trend: Consumer robotics is moving from general-purpose autonomous hardware toward narrowly defined, repeatable tasks that can justify a device’s cost and privacy trade-offs.
For two weeks, @caro_milanesi lived with Amazon's robot. Here's her report on what she, her husband, and her pets thought about it. https://www.fastcompany.com/ ...
So what is it like to have @amazon #Astro moving in with you for two weeks? I share my experience for @FastCompany As an analyst I have plenty to say about the opportunity of #homerobotics but for now, I wanted to share the experience more as a somewhat regular consumer https://t…
@harrymccracken @caro_milanesi Astonishing how quickly even an analytic researcher anthropomorphizes electronic objects. The human desire to project ourselves, or to want to be seen, is profound.
A brief thread about stupid robots, and Amazon's latest wonderful opportunity for people to become part of a cynical experiment in surveillance capitalism, brought to you by our late lamented friend Douglas Adams. First, the offending item: https://www.theverge.com/...
Amazon's vision for the future of home security includes drones flying over your roof, outdoor cameras that monitor for possible trespassers and cute robots patrolling indoors. https://www.cnn.com/...
@caro_milanesi @harrymccracken I think the insurmountable distinction between a pet and a robot is their nature away from us. Dogs might miss us, but they would go on doing dog things. What is the nature of a roomba or a Tesla away from us? They are still, & will always be, close…
Great article by @caro_milanesi re her experience with Amazon's Astro. It's interesting that when we initially considered sentient robots - Like R2-D2 or WALL-E we didn't really think about them being “cloud-connected,” and sending everything back to HQ. https://www.fastcompany.c…
@qhardy @harrymccracken It is indeed fascinating. I do refer to Alexa as she and I think of it as a human for Astro, as I do with all our pets, I refer to it as he but saw it as a pet-like rather human-like because of the shape. Clearly, this is rationalizing after the fact
I wish Amazon would as much effort into making it easy to buy a pair of shorts to play golf in..... as it does with making a home robot that is basically a terrible mobile phone that follows you around stealing any remaining privacy. https://www.theverge.com/...