CNBC’s Todd Haselton checks out the Amazon Astro home robot.
Amazon announced its long-rumored $999 Astro home robot on Tuesday. I had a chance to check it out in a demo with Amazon last week and wanted to share a few thoughts on what Astro is, what it can and can’t do and why Amazon decided to build a home robot. Astro seems like a strange gadget for Amazon to launch. The company is best known as an online store. And most of its operating profit comes from its AWS cloud business. Notably, Astro is a „Day 1 Edition“ product, which means it won’t be sold to everyone at first. Instead, Amazon will ask people to sign up and then invite them to order the robot. That allows Amazon to avoid building too many gadgets it won’t sell and a public flop like the Amazon Fire Phone that was discontinued in 2015. Amazon said Astro will go on sale later this year but did not give a specific launch date. (It’s worth noting that Amazon has made similar promises about future products that either never launched or were severely delayed.) So, why robots? „We get together every once in a while and we organize a senior team meeting around ‚what are some of the changes in technology?'“ Amazon’s vice president of product Charlie Tritschler told me. „And we talked about AI and processors getting more powerful and inevitably robotics came up. And one of the discussions was: ‚Does anyone here in this meeting think that in 5-10 years there won’t be more robots in your home?‘ And everyone was like ‚well yeah, of course.‘ It’s like, well then let’s going.“ Tritschler said Astro brings together a lot of what Amazon already offers in other products. „We’ve got a decade-plus with what we’ve done in fulfillment centers,“ Tritschler said of the company’s industrial robots that cart products through its warehouses.
