Moxie maker Embodied is going under, teaching important lessons about cloud services

Comment The maker of Moxie, an "AI"-powered educational robot for kids, is going out of business - and the $800 bots will die with it.

Embodied Inc. made the Moxie Robot, which is a cloud-connected interactive robot intended to be a friendly educational tool for small children. The snag is that its maker has encountered what it calls "financial challenges" and is closing down:

So, another little pop in what an increasing number of commentators, from Ed Zitron earlier this month to Cory Doctorow a year ago, see as the looming collapse of the AI bubble.

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The problem is that the robots are not just cloud-connected, they're entirely cloud-driven. When the company closes down, the robots will all shut off too. We don't know how many Moxies were sold - not enough, apparently - but it looks like there will be more heartbroken kids when their "plastic pal who's fun to be with" suddenly drops dead.

This was eminently foreseeable. Indeed, CEO Paolo Pirjanian, formerly CTO at iRobot - no longer to be an Amazon subsidiary - did foresee it, and planned for it. The Register quoted him in 2007, when he said:

You can certainly see why you'd want your products to be as indispensable as your internet connection, but making them dependent on an internet connection, and of course for there to be live servers for them to connect to, seems to us to display less foresight.

It's not the first deliberately cute internet-connected gizmo to stop working, of course. Remember the Nabaztag light-up bunny? The year before The Reg quoted Pirjanian, we noted they were competition prizes. The servers were shut down in 2010 and the bunnies died. (They were hacked and brought back to life in 2018, and subsequently relaunched.)

The thing is, though, that the Nabaztag was, or is, a harmless amusing gadget for grownups. Embodied's devices were specifically designed to appeal to children aged five to ten, and to get those children to bond with them. Especially kids with social anxiety, citing research in social and emotional skills training. It also had happy adult owners, such as TikTok user Heather Frazier.

It will be hard to explain to those kids why their electronic friend won't talk to them anymore. We suspect that they will not find "the company ran out of money" any consolation at all.

There is, we feel, a much greater lesson here. No matter how much money you pay for a cloud service, and even if you have contracts and reassuring SLAs, you don't have your data. The vendor does, and you can't be sure what they're doing with it. Always remember, there is no cloud. If you're lucky, you may be able to download a copy of the data, but without the app, it may not be much use - and if the vendors go under, you might not be able to get it back. Some photographers doubtless remember when Digital Railroad derailed - subscribers had just 24 hours to download their portfolios before the servers were turned off.

Even if you get the data, it may not be in any useful form. Without a local client - say, if the vendor only supplies a web app - you have nothing. And if it doesn't talk over some documented protocol, even having a local client isn't much use. In this instance, the Moxie hardware cost $799, about £639, and if you bought it more than 30 days earlier, there are no refunds. You get to keep the now-useless device, which was only ever a peripheral to a service in a datacenter rack somewhere.

There are some counter-examples. While XMPP is still around, for many-to-many comms, its obvious successor is Matrix. As we wrote in 2022, it's been natively supported in Thunderbird since version 102. The Matrix Foundation launched version 2.0 of its protocol in late October.

The FOSS world is responding to this growing issue. The Local First software movement is an effort to work out how to build apps that allow you to collaborate over the internet, while always storing and controlling your own data. A key technology behind this is Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, or CRDTs for short.

It's a developing area. We wonder how many finance directors or chief technology officers will need to be reduced to tears, like the unfortunate Moxie owners, when they find that they're out of a job because their corporate infrastructure has been owned, before they learn that this stuff matters. ®