Astro: A Robot with Real Personality and Potential to Revolutionize Home Automation

As I watched Astro, Amazon's latest robot, move around my home with ease, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity. Astro is not just a delivery robot, but a device that has been designed to emulate the personality of a pet, complete with its own set of movements and actions. The developers behind Astro have told me that they wanted to create a robot that would be like having a pet in the home, one that could bring joy and companionship to users.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with Astro, watching it interact with my kids and seeing how it performed in different scenarios. One of the things that struck me was Astro's ability to engage with children. It's not just a device that can deliver packages or play music; it has a personality that makes it fun to be around. The developers have told me that they wanted Astro to feel like a pet, and I think they've succeeded in creating a robot that kids will love.

One of the features that I found particularly interesting was Astro's ability to dance. Yes, you read that right - Astro can do the cha cha slide! It's not just a limited set of movements; Astro has been programmed to perform a variety of dances, from the "astro boogie" to the "robot rock". It's clear that the developers have put a lot of thought into creating a robot that is fun and engaging.

But what really sets Astro apart is its ability to deliver drinks and other items around the house. It's not just a device that can be controlled remotely; it has a physical presence that allows it to move around and interact with users. I watched as my kids played with Astro, watching as it moved around the room and delivered them cups of juice and snacks.

Of course, Astro isn't without its flaws. One of the things that struck me was the way it struggled to listen for commands. At times, it seemed like Astro wasn't paying attention at all, even when I spoke directly to it. However, this is a problem that Amazon has acknowledged and is working to address.

Despite these challenges, Astro remains an interesting device with a lot of potential. It's not just a novelty item; it's a serious contender in the world of home automation. And while it may not be perfect - yet - I think it's clear that Astro is going to be a game-changer for people who want to bring some personality and fun into their homes.

But what about its potential impact on our daily lives? Will Astro become an integral part of our households, or will it remain a novelty item? As we continue to live in a world where technology is increasingly present in our homes, I think it's worth considering the implications of devices like Astro. Are they just a convenient way to get things done, or do they have the potential to change the way we interact with our surroundings?

In terms of its performance, Astro doesn't really stand out from other smart displays like Amazon's Echo Show 10. While it has some unique features, such as its ability to move around and deliver drinks, it ultimately feels like a more limited device. However, I think this is partly due to the fact that Astro is still in the early stages of development.

One thing that did strike me was the way Astro's camera is used to navigate around the house. The developers have made an effort to ensure that Astro's processing happens on-device, rather than relying on cloud-based services. This means that users' data is being handled more locally, which is a big plus from a security standpoint.

However, this also means that the map on the Astro app is pretty stripped down compared to what we're used to seeing in other smart displays. And while I appreciate the developers' efforts to protect user privacy, I do think it's worth noting that Astro is still a device that is capturing images and video of our homes.

As I continued to watch Astro, I couldn't help but feel a sense of unease. Are we comfortable with having cameras in our homes, even if they're just being used for the benefit of robots like Astro? And what does this say about the way we're moving towards a future where technology is increasingly present in our daily lives?

Despite these concerns, I do think that Astro represents an exciting step forward in the world of home automation. It's not perfect - yet - but it has the potential to bring joy and companionship into our homes in ways that we never thought possible.

As for its price tag, I think it's clear that Astro is a luxury item. While it may be worth it for some people, others may find it too expensive. However, I do think that the novelty factor will help to drive interest in devices like Astro, even if they're not as practical or affordable as we'd like.

In conclusion, Astro is an interesting device with a lot of potential. It's not just a delivery robot; it's a serious contender in the world of home automation. While it may have its flaws, I think it's clear that Astro has the potential to bring joy and companionship into our homes in ways that we never thought possible. As we move forward in this brave new world of smart technology, I think it's worth considering the implications of devices like Astro. Are they just a convenient way to get things done, or do they have the potential to change the way we interact with our surroundings?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni've spent over two weeks with amazon astro to find out if i can recommend it i can't yet and here's why astro is a one thousand dollar home robot that's invite only from amazon right now if and when this thing gets a full launch that price will jump up to fifteen hundred dollars we're going to cover the basics of what astro is and then we're going to put it to the test how good of a home security device is it what about the convenience it adds is it good at playing with your kids and how does it stand up to a plain old echo show 10 let's get right to it astro does a lot of stuff you can play music while it follows you around the house you can send it into another room to deliver a drink or snacks you can watch shows on its screen you can monitor the house while you're away and plenty more astro basically has the same exact 10.1 inch screen as an echo show 10 but a different speaker array including two 55 millimeter full range speakers and a passive bass radiator what really sets it apart though is its mobility long story short amazon took navigation technology that robot vacuums have been using for years and it applied it for a different purpose astro doesn't have to cover every inch of your floor it just has to navigate quickly and efficiently from one room to another without knocking into things falling down stairs or knocking over that pile of blocks that your kids have been spending the last 20 minutes building in addition to the navigation tech astro also boasts three cameras one five megapixel camera on the bezel of the screen and two cameras on this periscope a five megapixel and a 12 megapixel camera which you can use for everything from taking selfies although is it really a selfie if you're taking it astro to monitoring your house while you're away this little robot seems pretty cool in theory right well before you go hitting that pre-order button let's see it in action once we started setting astro up we ran into our first problem basically astro failed twice to map the ground floor of the cnet smart home so i hopped on a call with an amazon rep and talked about possible explanations what we concluded was that either the floors were too shiny or the windows were too bright or the exposed staircase with its railing was messing with how astro set up room boundaries so we closed the shades covered the exposed staircase with cardboard and tried again this time astro successfully mapped the floor the takeaway this is still very much a work in progress yes astro is a finished piece of hardware but the updates that are going to be rolling out progressively for it are going to make it better able to navigate architecturally diverse homes and when we did remove the cardboard from the staircase astro was able to navigate without further problems after that initial mapping we walked around the house with astro telling it which rooms were which which gave us this nice little map in the astro app where we could adjust room boundaries as we saw fit all in all aside from the initial problems with mapping the space setup was fairly quick and easy okay but you don't just want a robot to zoom around your house for no reason it's gotta actually do something and astro's clearest justification it seems to me is its home security monitoring if you've got a ring protect pro plan astro can patrol your house while you're away sending you notifications and checking on unusual sounds and even emitting an alarm if you tell it to do so you can also manually take over astro's eyes and ears to drive around your house while you're away checking that nothing is awry the real question is how well do these features actually work well if you thought the setup for the mapping was bad just wait till you see what we had to do for home security we spent a couple of hours trying to get astro to connect with ring before yet again having to get on the phone with amazon to troubleshoot well turns out all we had to do was delete our existing ring cameras and unpair all of our other alexa compatible devices to make it work no problem right right okay look i am frustrated that i'm going to have to spend a few hours at least rebuilding our amazon powered ecosystem here at the smart home but this thing still is just a work in progress and amazon did tell me that they are working on a fix to this problem right now once the ring integration was finally working though we decided to put it to the test by staging a break-in essentially we're gonna see if chris can enter the house through the exercise room make it to the master bedroom to steal a rock that definitely probably has a geode inside and then get back out the door before astro hears and confronts him during the first test chris breaks in and despite being very loud astro doesn't move so i realized that despite ring protect throw being active and astro being armed you also have to have guard plus set up separately which is its own feature on the amazon voice assistant app okay so we reset everything is ready and chris enters grabs the rock and astro stays put the whole time once again i double check with amazon and everything is set up properly it just didn't hear chris at all i wanted to give astro a fair shake so i set astro to patrol you can only have it patrol at most once per hour so it's fairly unlikely that astro would be patrolling during a break-in but it turns out if it is it actually responds and catches chris pretty well so just make sure that you ask your burglar to schedule their break-in accordingly since astro isn't a good listener we set up an entry sensor with our ring alarm pro system on the door chris will be entering chris comes in and sets off the alarm and astro goes rolling the opposite direction okay we're calling it honestly i'm really underwhelmed at how astro performs as a home security robot really the big problem is that you have three apps that you're having to navigate to make this thing work you have the astro app the alexa app and the ring app and it's unclear how they interface and how to make the whole system work together well now i do like being able to remotely check in on my house but that doesn't really deter burglars and astro can't reliably respond to sounds in the house either when it comes to home security reliability is kind of the name of the game another much touted feature astro boasts is its ability to run basic errands for you finding people and making deliveries and it can definitely do that when the way is clear but we wanted to answer two questions number one can it find people around the house and number two can it make deliveries in a house that's a little bit messier for our first test we want to see if astro can find andrew who's hiding somewhere around the house faster than i can find him using astro's manual navigation i'll go first so i'm going to start by just heading to the kitchen i guess let's see let's see if i go so if i go this way andrew over here is not behind the counters that i can see let's maybe head to the dinette not seeing him in here oh can i turn around all right let's let's head back maybe he's in the bathroom i'm just gonna take a quick peek in there it's honestly faster for me to navigate just by telling which room astro should go to than it is for me to try to actually manually navigate around um and so in that way astros navigation just on its own is pretty efficient um what i would guess is that it's not as fast as i will be at kind of looking around and that you know seeing if i actually see andrew around all right he's not in the exercise room so let's head on back i'll just go back straight to the bathroom maybe i'll see him on the way in the bedroom let's see oh i found him he's in the bathtub all right there we are okay now that i found andrew in about two and a half minutes let's see how astro does astro go find andrew it's driving down the hallway stopping in the kitchen and right off the bat you can see it's taking a similar route to the one i took which makes sense given the shape of the house it's just moving sequentially okay it's looking around which you'll notice here astro does a lot like i guess before astro moves from room to room just as quickly on its own as i did when i was controlling it but it takes a long time to swivel around and scan the whole room for andrew whereas i a human can tell at a glance whether anyone is there even if i can't see every single corner of the room in other words inference doesn't seem to be astro's strongest feature all right i'm gonna fast forward here and see when it finally finds andrew hits the living room and the master bedroom and then there you go it finds andrew at about four and a half minutes it took nearly twice as long but astro did accomplish the task for our second test we decided to just let andrew stay in the bathtub because i mean he needs it and we wanted to see if astro could deliver a drink to him so let's give it a shot we'll see how astro deals with a clean house first astro bring a drink to andrew in the master bathroom okay once i finally get the can into the cup holder i can wait for astro to process and it gets going so it's navigating through a clean house here we left the door into the bedroom open so it would have a very easy route straight back to the master bedroom it's getting around corners really easily you see it going through these nice wide alleys and it makes it into the master bathroom where it finds andrew hi yes are you confused by not knowing how to get close from me there you go but houses aren't always that tidy especially if you have kids or you just like to live in squalor like andrew does so we're gonna shut a door along the main route to the master bathroom and leave out some trash on the floor okay so astro is off it is going in that same route and it's expecting that bedroom door to be open doesn't see that it's closed yet but okay it hits it it reroutes right away it's turning it doesn't seem phased all right it does seem to be slowing down here we'll see if it can make it past these chairs all right it does it makes it it goes around it runs right over that sweatshirt no problem it's going past that chip bag across another shirt here astro really doesn't have a problem running over things that are less than like half an inch tall it's going through the bedroom and it seems like it's just trucking straight onto andrew at this point oh there's a broom okay it does make it past the broom without tipping it over and there it is for andrew nice job astro all right you made it to be so fast don't get confused now hi okay all right delivery completed but i'm unable to turn around okay astro to reach over there if i was actually in a bath i would be upset okay now we're gonna really throw some curve balls in there okay let's see astro it always takes a long time to process my requests all right it's getting going and it's moving this direction okay it sees some shoes that were left by the door it's really having a little bit of a struggle there but it does make it past them now there's a cord that we left out here you know just like vacuum cords any other cords that we would have around and the first two wheels seem to get across the cord really easily but that back wheel which is a lot smaller than the front two wheels seems to catch that cord but it doesn't seem slowed down at this point or not too much at least all right we've got that chair that we moved and astro seems to have actually navigated past the chair without a problem but now we have these blocks and honestly i was not expecting these blocks to pose very much of a problem for astro but it really is struggling here can it make it past the blocks i don't know it's backing up and you see astro actually do this oh my goodness it just tried to go over the blocks and it is i think it's stuck it is it is in fact stuck there you go the blocks actually or the one thing that i did not expect to stop astro were the blocks and that's what did it and now it's trying to go back to me to give me the drink which it can't do all right we're going to give this another shot and what i'm actually going to do we're not going to change anything we're actually just going to push those blocks back a teeny bit but mainly we want to see if astro actually learns and adapts from its experience that it just had so let's see it's going off and it runs into these shoes again but this time it actually does navigate past them a little bit faster than last time i'm not expecting it to be able to get past this cord again because it's not like it can learn how to make its back wheel a little bit bigger so it is caught on the cord again but again it doesn't seem like it's slowing it down too much well actually i i take that back it looks like maybe it is okay it's going back to the door that it nose is closed and now it's just dragging the whole cord behind it if this were attached to a vacuum the vacuum would be on the floor at this point and astro is just totally totally tangled up at this point okay but it actually gets free of the cord it gets free of the cord it gets past the blocks easily we put a little poop here it ran over the poop okay now it's just running into a box there's the box no problem all right and it's speeding now astro is confident it's in that home stretch it makes it past the pillow oh there's a c c-stand here we use those to hold lights for the camera equipment here and it makes it past it okay there's the broom and it squeezes between the broom and the door frame and it makes it to andrew oh don't mess this up now all right with my item hooray astro isn't just a delivery robot it's got real personality and the developers have told me that they wanted to emulate more of a pet-like persona with this device so some office mates and i brought our kids into the smart home to see how they liked playing with astro astra do the robot act like a dog periscope what is that guy that's a camera astro users oh follow me i said thought after was good but bad good and bad at the same time what i like about astro is the dances he can do ascio can also deliver drinks to you he can make you laugh what i liked about astro that he was very funny and if he said follow me he would just kind of follow you around ashley is not a good listener sometimes he does crazy things when i said act like a tiger he just said tiger added to the shopping list obviously astro is going to get your kids attention and probably their affection too but i did see over time some drop off in interest with my kids and i think that part of it is because this has a lot of the novelty features that you saw in voice assistance in the early days i happened to get a pet snail for my kids at about the same time as i got astro and the snail who we named frodo of course honestly proved a lot more entertaining in the long run to them now let's set aside all that headline grabbing stuff and take a look at how astro stacks up to an amazon echo show smart display after all it's got the screen the speaker and the voice assistant add a set of wheels to that and suddenly you've got music playing right next to you even when you're doing chores all through the house since astro is made by amazon it pretty much works with what you'd expect it to work with you can control compatible smart home devices call it into a room with an echo speaker and it works with ring two just not all that well as we've seen now this thing has amazon's voice assistant on board so you can listen to music or play tv shows on it but it really isn't as good as amazon's smart speakers at listening for waypoints amazon says this is mainly due to the changing acoustics as this thing drives around your house so it's not great now but i would hope that it'll get better over time that said sound quality is one of the places astro really shined even compared to the already impressive echo show 10. i've been trying to figure out for weeks now how to review a robot it's not like there's that much to compare it to and what makes it harder is that astro doesn't really have a singular selling point to it it's just sort of a generalist and telling you how good a generalist is is kind of tough but this isn't just a me problem it's a problem for astro too even if amazon polishes up all the rough edges and right now there are still a lot of rough edges we don't normally buy products for our houses that do a bunch of stuff just okay no we get what we need and we spend what we have to to get it astro isn't like that this is a luxury item and people with a lot of money maybe too much money will buy this just for the novelty the fact that this is a robot is the use case what's more astro is yet another device smuggling cameras into our homes normalizing life on camera at all times and that's a scary trend but pretty much all of astros processing happens on device and even the map on your app is a pretty stripped down version of what astro is using to navigate so those are good steps amazon is taking to protect privacy so listen astro isn't a privacy disaster but it's also not a privacy neutral device it's definitely sliding us toward a worse future but amazon hasn't created a black mirror type dystopia yet what most people will care more about is the fact that astro is a solution in search of a problem and honestly it's not even that strong of a solution especially given its subpar security performance it's cool undeniably and i'm excited to see what home robots look like in the near future astro really does feel like a step forward in all sorts of ways not least of which is it's actually being used in people's houses but for now astro remains an interesting device with a lot of promise but too little utility to really be worth that price tag thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video make sure to like and subscribe for more if you're interested in buying astro or want to read our review on it you can check out the links below and if you want to see our video that shows you everything astro can do you can click on this window right here thanks for watchingi've spent over two weeks with amazon astro to find out if i can recommend it i can't yet and here's why astro is a one thousand dollar home robot that's invite only from amazon right now if and when this thing gets a full launch that price will jump up to fifteen hundred dollars we're going to cover the basics of what astro is and then we're going to put it to the test how good of a home security device is it what about the convenience it adds is it good at playing with your kids and how does it stand up to a plain old echo show 10 let's get right to it astro does a lot of stuff you can play music while it follows you around the house you can send it into another room to deliver a drink or snacks you can watch shows on its screen you can monitor the house while you're away and plenty more astro basically has the same exact 10.1 inch screen as an echo show 10 but a different speaker array including two 55 millimeter full range speakers and a passive bass radiator what really sets it apart though is its mobility long story short amazon took navigation technology that robot vacuums have been using for years and it applied it for a different purpose astro doesn't have to cover every inch of your floor it just has to navigate quickly and efficiently from one room to another without knocking into things falling down stairs or knocking over that pile of blocks that your kids have been spending the last 20 minutes building in addition to the navigation tech astro also boasts three cameras one five megapixel camera on the bezel of the screen and two cameras on this periscope a five megapixel and a 12 megapixel camera which you can use for everything from taking selfies although is it really a selfie if you're taking it astro to monitoring your house while you're away this little robot seems pretty cool in theory right well before you go hitting that pre-order button let's see it in action once we started setting astro up we ran into our first problem basically astro failed twice to map the ground floor of the cnet smart home so i hopped on a call with an amazon rep and talked about possible explanations what we concluded was that either the floors were too shiny or the windows were too bright or the exposed staircase with its railing was messing with how astro set up room boundaries so we closed the shades covered the exposed staircase with cardboard and tried again this time astro successfully mapped the floor the takeaway this is still very much a work in progress yes astro is a finished piece of hardware but the updates that are going to be rolling out progressively for it are going to make it better able to navigate architecturally diverse homes and when we did remove the cardboard from the staircase astro was able to navigate without further problems after that initial mapping we walked around the house with astro telling it which rooms were which which gave us this nice little map in the astro app where we could adjust room boundaries as we saw fit all in all aside from the initial problems with mapping the space setup was fairly quick and easy okay but you don't just want a robot to zoom around your house for no reason it's gotta actually do something and astro's clearest justification it seems to me is its home security monitoring if you've got a ring protect pro plan astro can patrol your house while you're away sending you notifications and checking on unusual sounds and even emitting an alarm if you tell it to do so you can also manually take over astro's eyes and ears to drive around your house while you're away checking that nothing is awry the real question is how well do these features actually work well if you thought the setup for the mapping was bad just wait till you see what we had to do for home security we spent a couple of hours trying to get astro to connect with ring before yet again having to get on the phone with amazon to troubleshoot well turns out all we had to do was delete our existing ring cameras and unpair all of our other alexa compatible devices to make it work no problem right right okay look i am frustrated that i'm going to have to spend a few hours at least rebuilding our amazon powered ecosystem here at the smart home but this thing still is just a work in progress and amazon did tell me that they are working on a fix to this problem right now once the ring integration was finally working though we decided to put it to the test by staging a break-in essentially we're gonna see if chris can enter the house through the exercise room make it to the master bedroom to steal a rock that definitely probably has a geode inside and then get back out the door before astro hears and confronts him during the first test chris breaks in and despite being very loud astro doesn't move so i realized that despite ring protect throw being active and astro being armed you also have to have guard plus set up separately which is its own feature on the amazon voice assistant app okay so we reset everything is ready and chris enters grabs the rock and astro stays put the whole time once again i double check with amazon and everything is set up properly it just didn't hear chris at all i wanted to give astro a fair shake so i set astro to patrol you can only have it patrol at most once per hour so it's fairly unlikely that astro would be patrolling during a break-in but it turns out if it is it actually responds and catches chris pretty well so just make sure that you ask your burglar to schedule their break-in accordingly since astro isn't a good listener we set up an entry sensor with our ring alarm pro system on the door chris will be entering chris comes in and sets off the alarm and astro goes rolling the opposite direction okay we're calling it honestly i'm really underwhelmed at how astro performs as a home security robot really the big problem is that you have three apps that you're having to navigate to make this thing work you have the astro app the alexa app and the ring app and it's unclear how they interface and how to make the whole system work together well now i do like being able to remotely check in on my house but that doesn't really deter burglars and astro can't reliably respond to sounds in the house either when it comes to home security reliability is kind of the name of the game another much touted feature astro boasts is its ability to run basic errands for you finding people and making deliveries and it can definitely do that when the way is clear but we wanted to answer two questions number one can it find people around the house and number two can it make deliveries in a house that's a little bit messier for our first test we want to see if astro can find andrew who's hiding somewhere around the house faster than i can find him using astro's manual navigation i'll go first so i'm going to start by just heading to the kitchen i guess let's see let's see if i go so if i go this way andrew over here is not behind the counters that i can see let's maybe head to the dinette not seeing him in here oh can i turn around all right let's let's head back maybe he's in the bathroom i'm just gonna take a quick peek in there it's honestly faster for me to navigate just by telling which room astro should go to than it is for me to try to actually manually navigate around um and so in that way astros navigation just on its own is pretty efficient um what i would guess is that it's not as fast as i will be at kind of looking around and that you know seeing if i actually see andrew around all right he's not in the exercise room so let's head on back i'll just go back straight to the bathroom maybe i'll see him on the way in the bedroom let's see oh i found him he's in the bathtub all right there we are okay now that i found andrew in about two and a half minutes let's see how astro does astro go find andrew it's driving down the hallway stopping in the kitchen and right off the bat you can see it's taking a similar route to the one i took which makes sense given the shape of the house it's just moving sequentially okay it's looking around which you'll notice here astro does a lot like i guess before astro moves from room to room just as quickly on its own as i did when i was controlling it but it takes a long time to swivel around and scan the whole room for andrew whereas i a human can tell at a glance whether anyone is there even if i can't see every single corner of the room in other words inference doesn't seem to be astro's strongest feature all right i'm gonna fast forward here and see when it finally finds andrew hits the living room and the master bedroom and then there you go it finds andrew at about four and a half minutes it took nearly twice as long but astro did accomplish the task for our second test we decided to just let andrew stay in the bathtub because i mean he needs it and we wanted to see if astro could deliver a drink to him so let's give it a shot we'll see how astro deals with a clean house first astro bring a drink to andrew in the master bathroom okay once i finally get the can into the cup holder i can wait for astro to process and it gets going so it's navigating through a clean house here we left the door into the bedroom open so it would have a very easy route straight back to the master bedroom it's getting around corners really easily you see it going through these nice wide alleys and it makes it into the master bathroom where it finds andrew hi yes are you confused by not knowing how to get close from me there you go but houses aren't always that tidy especially if you have kids or you just like to live in squalor like andrew does so we're gonna shut a door along the main route to the master bathroom and leave out some trash on the floor okay so astro is off it is going in that same route and it's expecting that bedroom door to be open doesn't see that it's closed yet but okay it hits it it reroutes right away it's turning it doesn't seem phased all right it does seem to be slowing down here we'll see if it can make it past these chairs all right it does it makes it it goes around it runs right over that sweatshirt no problem it's going past that chip bag across another shirt here astro really doesn't have a problem running over things that are less than like half an inch tall it's going through the bedroom and it seems like it's just trucking straight onto andrew at this point oh there's a broom okay it does make it past the broom without tipping it over and there it is for andrew nice job astro all right you made it to be so fast don't get confused now hi okay all right delivery completed but i'm unable to turn around okay astro to reach over there if i was actually in a bath i would be upset okay now we're gonna really throw some curve balls in there okay let's see astro it always takes a long time to process my requests all right it's getting going and it's moving this direction okay it sees some shoes that were left by the door it's really having a little bit of a struggle there but it does make it past them now there's a cord that we left out here you know just like vacuum cords any other cords that we would have around and the first two wheels seem to get across the cord really easily but that back wheel which is a lot smaller than the front two wheels seems to catch that cord but it doesn't seem slowed down at this point or not too much at least all right we've got that chair that we moved and astro seems to have actually navigated past the chair without a problem but now we have these blocks and honestly i was not expecting these blocks to pose very much of a problem for astro but it really is struggling here can it make it past the blocks i don't know it's backing up and you see astro actually do this oh my goodness it just tried to go over the blocks and it is i think it's stuck it is it is in fact stuck there you go the blocks actually or the one thing that i did not expect to stop astro were the blocks and that's what did it and now it's trying to go back to me to give me the drink which it can't do all right we're going to give this another shot and what i'm actually going to do we're not going to change anything we're actually just going to push those blocks back a teeny bit but mainly we want to see if astro actually learns and adapts from its experience that it just had so let's see it's going off and it runs into these shoes again but this time it actually does navigate past them a little bit faster than last time i'm not expecting it to be able to get past this cord again because it's not like it can learn how to make its back wheel a little bit bigger so it is caught on the cord again but again it doesn't seem like it's slowing it down too much well actually i i take that back it looks like maybe it is okay it's going back to the door that it nose is closed and now it's just dragging the whole cord behind it if this were attached to a vacuum the vacuum would be on the floor at this point and astro is just totally totally tangled up at this point okay but it actually gets free of the cord it gets free of the cord it gets past the blocks easily we put a little poop here it ran over the poop okay now it's just running into a box there's the box no problem all right and it's speeding now astro is confident it's in that home stretch it makes it past the pillow oh there's a c c-stand here we use those to hold lights for the camera equipment here and it makes it past it okay there's the broom and it squeezes between the broom and the door frame and it makes it to andrew oh don't mess this up now all right with my item hooray astro isn't just a delivery robot it's got real personality and the developers have told me that they wanted to emulate more of a pet-like persona with this device so some office mates and i brought our kids into the smart home to see how they liked playing with astro astra do the robot act like a dog periscope what is that guy that's a camera astro users oh follow me i said thought after was good but bad good and bad at the same time what i like about astro is the dances he can do ascio can also deliver drinks to you he can make you laugh what i liked about astro that he was very funny and if he said follow me he would just kind of follow you around ashley is not a good listener sometimes he does crazy things when i said act like a tiger he just said tiger added to the shopping list obviously astro is going to get your kids attention and probably their affection too but i did see over time some drop off in interest with my kids and i think that part of it is because this has a lot of the novelty features that you saw in voice assistance in the early days i happened to get a pet snail for my kids at about the same time as i got astro and the snail who we named frodo of course honestly proved a lot more entertaining in the long run to them now let's set aside all that headline grabbing stuff and take a look at how astro stacks up to an amazon echo show smart display after all it's got the screen the speaker and the voice assistant add a set of wheels to that and suddenly you've got music playing right next to you even when you're doing chores all through the house since astro is made by amazon it pretty much works with what you'd expect it to work with you can control compatible smart home devices call it into a room with an echo speaker and it works with ring two just not all that well as we've seen now this thing has amazon's voice assistant on board so you can listen to music or play tv shows on it but it really isn't as good as amazon's smart speakers at listening for waypoints amazon says this is mainly due to the changing acoustics as this thing drives around your house so it's not great now but i would hope that it'll get better over time that said sound quality is one of the places astro really shined even compared to the already impressive echo show 10. i've been trying to figure out for weeks now how to review a robot it's not like there's that much to compare it to and what makes it harder is that astro doesn't really have a singular selling point to it it's just sort of a generalist and telling you how good a generalist is is kind of tough but this isn't just a me problem it's a problem for astro too even if amazon polishes up all the rough edges and right now there are still a lot of rough edges we don't normally buy products for our houses that do a bunch of stuff just okay no we get what we need and we spend what we have to to get it astro isn't like that this is a luxury item and people with a lot of money maybe too much money will buy this just for the novelty the fact that this is a robot is the use case what's more astro is yet another device smuggling cameras into our homes normalizing life on camera at all times and that's a scary trend but pretty much all of astros processing happens on device and even the map on your app is a pretty stripped down version of what astro is using to navigate so those are good steps amazon is taking to protect privacy so listen astro isn't a privacy disaster but it's also not a privacy neutral device it's definitely sliding us toward a worse future but amazon hasn't created a black mirror type dystopia yet what most people will care more about is the fact that astro is a solution in search of a problem and honestly it's not even that strong of a solution especially given its subpar security performance it's cool undeniably and i'm excited to see what home robots look like in the near future astro really does feel like a step forward in all sorts of ways not least of which is it's actually being used in people's houses but for now astro remains an interesting device with a lot of promise but too little utility to really be worth that price tag thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video make sure to like and subscribe for more if you're interested in buying astro or want to read our review on it you can check out the links below and if you want to see our video that shows you everything astro can do you can click on this window right here thanks for watching\n"