Anki Vector Home Robot REVIEW

back in the late 90s when Sony brought out their first a bow robotic dog I was initially quite intrigued by the idea that was until I saw one in action and realized that it kind of stumbled around like it had arthritis and barely did anything other than mess around with a ping ball now over the years I was hoping they were going to keep updating it so it became more functional and they updated it but it never really seemed to do a great deal more so I kind of went off the idea now Abo's back again you can pre-order a new version of it I know some people are very happy about this but I've seen demonstrations of that he really doesn't seem to do anything more than the first versions did and it costs a heck of a lot of money but I'm still kind of interested in the idea of having a little robot around the house so and got one of these vectors from Anki now unlike the AVO which can go wandering around your house to a limited degree the vectors pretty much restricted to sitting on a tabletop and just moving around a few feet at a time it can though whilst it's on that tabletop seem to perform a wider range of functions after all this connected up to the Internet so it'll tell you what the weather is for example and you can even play a little game of blackjack on that built-in LED screen it works a little bit like one of the Amazon or Google home assistant type devices but whilst this does cost a fraction of the price of the Sony AIBO it does cost a heck of a lot more than say an Amazon echo dot so is it worth the price well let's find out you'll notice as well as the vector here I've got the vector space what's the vector space you ask well I wasn't exactly sure but I thought well I'm in for a penny in for 280 pounds might as well get both of them and then we'll see exactly what this thing does now better preface this whole thing by saying of course I'm some middle-aged chap but I'm pretty sure this hasn't been aimed appealing to people by age this is more for children had imagined although they won't be paying for it so let's show the parents of these children what they would be getting for Christmas then they could decide whether the child would find it interesting or not anyway here's everything you get inside the box this is the charging base which has two electrical contacts on there which marry up with the contacts on the bottom of the robot and that is charged by a standard USB power adapter this is the cube that the robot interacts with and this has a pullout because there's a battery inside here and I guess that once that battery goes flat you better take the screw to the bottom and replace it now on to the vector itself it's a little bit smaller than I was expecting on the front of it is an O LED screen and then beneath that is a camera it drives around on these rubber tracks and the only way it can lift anything is with this shovel type arrangement on the front which is really just designed for manipulating the cube that comes with it now looking inside the instruction booklet here you can see that I need to connect it up to the Internet and I'll also need to provide my own USB power adapter now the first job is to put it on its charging base and plug it into that USB adapter and then also download the app that's available for iOS or Android so let's get on with that this USB lead is a bit stingy in its length a couple feet extra wouldn't have gone amiss there but anyway I plugged it in put the device on it's charging base you can see the indicator lights come on on the back and then after a short amount of time it wakes up and the screen displays the web address that you need to go to to learn more but all you really doing is downloading the app from your app store and then once you've got that downloaded go through a couple of little setup procedures connect up the device via bluetooth to your phone and then once you've got those two things connected up tell it the Wi-Fi password and once it connects up to Wi-Fi it then downloads an update so whilst it's doing that let's have a look at this vector space thing I bought that wasn't entirely sure what this was but I thought I should get it just in case and it turns out that I've just bought a very expensive plastic tray it's got rubber feet on the bottom but that's pretty much all is plastic tray with a cutter in the corner for the charging base so let's go back to the robot again changing a few things on here such as the units and where you are in the world so it knows the weather and then take the battery tab out of the cube you can see we've got some lights in here now and let's see what this thing does right the first thing to say is that the phone app isn't controlling it it's just giving me some information as to what I should do to set it up because it's all voice controls so the first thing you have to do is say hey vector which then wakes it up gets it listening to you and to start with you do things such as getting it to recognize your face so that later johnny could say hey vector who am i and it will repeat your name back to you and you can see here at the moments I've asked it what's the weather like this time it's 63 degrees a nice sunny day a vector set a one-minute countdown timer you can see there's a lot of work being done here to imbue the robot with some fun quirky wall-e type personality it's quite effective really let's just see what happens when that time is up now at that point you can either speak to it to tell it to stop the alarm or press the dot on the back which is a button you can also press that button to activate it as well instead of saying hey vector and just like all these other devices it's just listing out for that keyword it's listing out for hey vector and then once you've said that the lights come out on the back and then you can give it a further command one of those commands is to take a picture and they'll camera below the screen on the front there will point toward you and take a photo which it then sends to your phone it doesn't put it into the cloud it's just going straight to your phone and then from there you can then do what you want with that picture if the privacy issues of a web connected robot with a camera on the front are of a concern then I suggest you go and have a look at their website and read about security and privacy but that's something you have to make your own mind up on look at me now what's the whole thing is controlled by voice the app does have a few little features in here to tell you what commands to use for the various things that it can do and I'll look through here now initially I thought that it had loads of things it could do but when you read through them there aren't all that many for example you can say hey vector good robots it'll just sort of blinker you and along the bottom of the screen now this is quite useful it gives you a status update as to exactly what's happening at the moment with the vector and you can do things like fist bumps and things but a lot of this stuff gets old very quickly after you used it once or twice it can play one game which is blackjack yes one of its features is the ability to move rhythmically in time with music it likes music with a good beat though but it's doing this the lights on its back change colors well it doesn't seem to like every tumor now as far as that cube well it's a bit of a mystery it will sometimes use it to stand up on its tracks with other times it will just roll it over sometimes it picks it up and sometimes it hits it and the lights change color there is some kind of interaction between the two where the robot will look at the cube and then the cube starts flashing but I thought it was going to be some kind of game that you could get involved in with those symbols of the cube but really it's just something for the robot to play around with on its own and then other times it just completely ignores it once the battery has worn down which in my experience so far seems to be off to say 15 minutes or so the robot will return automatically to his charging base and charge itself back up or you can ask it to do this earlier if you want you've got some limited customization options you can change the volume for the various cheap strips and whistles and you can also change the color of the eyes now you might be wondering about edge detection after all you don't want to buy one of these things have it drive itself off the edge of a table onto a hard wooden floor and immediately break so here I've said come here and it's heading towards me and you can see once it gets the edge it does have a detection to see that it's gone off the edge and it stops itself before it falls on the floor it's not foolproof though quite often it will drive along something along the edge and then get its track stuck off the edge and you have to pick it up and put it back on to get it working again I thought that might be because this particular table has a bit of a slope of the edge which might be confusing it so how but I have tried it on all the different surfaces in the house this one's got a slope as well and it happened there of course but I've tried it on various tables and it does seem to have a few little issues here it's got itself stuck on this one again tried it on that one you can see at the far end of the room which has a nice straight edge you've got itself stuck on there as well and here it's got itself stuck with a cube and then finally I'll try it on this one it didn't seem to have too much of a trouble on here I think maybe because the edges rounded on here it always seems to have a bit of one track still stuck on this if it does go off the edge it can bring itself back on again but I wasn't sure whether the black of white was confusing it a little bit here it did seem to act a little bit irrationally and you can see here it does this kind of angry movement sometimes and unfortunately decided to coincide it with the points at which it had already got itself hanging over the edge and obviously that wasn't a good idea and if I had got a wooden floor that might have caused a problem now the built-in functions such as what's the weather set at cyber what time is it and take a photo could be activated by issuing two commands first off you say a vector it wakes up and then you say for example what's the weather in Sydney and it came up with 57 degrees Fahrenheit you can change it to centigrade if you want and then showed a nice animation afterwards I think it's using the screen to its fullest abilities they'd like to see some of the other modes use the screen a little bit more detail like that but anyway as it's connected up to the Internet you can also do these other type of commands that are similar to the things you do with the Amazon all the Google devices etc where you ask it questions and he retrieves the information from the internet but these are a three-step process you have to say hey vector to wake you up then you have to say I have a question and then you ask your question that whole process takes quite a while to do hey I have a question what's one divided by zero [Music] so if you've got used to using any kind of voice assistant device in the home then the way this works does seem a little bit sluggish in comparison so you might just decide to keep this thing on a shelf somewhere and use it as a home assistant for setting timers telling you about the weather all that kind of stuff but then you might start feeling a little bit guilty if you put it in the vector space because in that small area it's unable to use its cube it needs to be outside there to play around with that now it does seem to be its favorite toy they've got a bit of a love-hate relationship but I'm starting to feel ever so slightly guilty about keeping the robot in such a small space and putting its toy on the outside makes me feel a little bit sad really over time the vectors do to gain additional features through software updates and I registered a there are plans to integrate it with Amazon's echo however as a voice-controlled home assistant it leaves a lot to be desired and an echo dot costs a heck of a lot less of course you're paying a lot for the robot side but when it all boils down that really doesn't do a great deal other than just wander around a tabletop I do think though it stands a good chance of being a big hot ticket item this Christmas with no new consoles out this year perhaps this will become the must-have toy that everyone wants but nobody can get although I do wonder how many of the people who do get one for Christmas are still going to be using it regularly when January comes around but of course isn't that always the case but don't get me wrong it does give a great demo and anyone who sees it will most likely be charmed and it's even almost useful at times but ultimately it might be a better idea getting your child a hamster anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 1,270,474

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Anki, Vector, Robot, Home Assistant, internet connected, app, anki vector review, demo, test, demonstartion, games, toy, 2018, space, cute, hands on, gadget, pet, gift, guide

Id: is-rSK5y6EQ

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018