Amazon working on secret home robot with ChatGPT-like features

Amazon is secretly developing an upgraded version of its Astro home robot to understand what it observes and respond to things more intelligently.

This is part of a secret new AI robot project, internally codenamed “Burnham,” that adds a layer of “intelligence and a con-versational spoken interface” to Astro, reports Insider, citing internal documents.

Called “Contextual Understanding,” Amazon describes the new technology as “our latest and most advanced AI technology designed to make robots more intelligent, more useful, and conversational,” the documents show.

According to Insider, the company often encourages staff to imagine future press releases for new technology they are developing. In one of these documents related to Burnham, Amazon describes an Astro product that costs $995. There’s an additional “Burnham Plus” $24.99 monthly fee for standard home monitoring features, and Burnham Plus with Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera would be $34.99 a month, according to this document.

Burnham is a broader initiative that could support a host of other products. The technology “remembers what it saw and understood,” and derives meaning from those interactions, the documents said. It can also engage in a Q&A dialogue on what it saw and understood, using large language model-based technology commonly found in apps like ChatGPT, and take appropriate actions based on that.

For instance, if Burnham finds a stove left burning or a water faucet running unattended, it will find the owner and bring it to their attention, the document said.

If an elderly man slips in the kitchen, Burnham can check to make sure he’s ok, and call others to come help. If it’s an emer-gency situation, Burnham will automatically call 911.

Besides, owners can ask Burnham where they left their keys. It can check whether the kitchen window was left open last night. The robot can also monitor whether the kids had friends over after school.

“To put it simply: Our robot has a strong body. What we need next is a brain,” one of the documents stated. “A robot with Burnham would understand — in the same way a human understands — the thousands of things that happen within a home every day without having to explicitly code for each one because that ‘common-sense’ knowledge is implicit in the data the language model was trained on.”

The move represents the next phase of growth for Astro, a heavily-invested, Alexa-powered home monitoring robot that so far appears to have failed to live up to Amazon’s lofty expectations. Despite years of investment and hundreds of people working on it, Astro has faced mediocre reviews and internal scorn, and is still hard to buy, as it remains invite-only, even after 18 months since its launch.

It’s also the latest example of Amazon incorporating generative AI and LLM technology into its existing products and ser-vices, as competitors like Microsoft and Google race ahead in the AI chatbot market. Amazon is planning to upgrade its Alexa voice-technology with ChatGPT-like features, as Insider previously reported, while it wants to build AI tools to auto-generate photos and videos for advertisers, according to The Information. Amazon’s CFO Brian Olsavsky said last month that more investment dollars are shifting from its core logistics business to such AI and LLM technologies.

In an email to Insider, Amazon’s spokesperson said Astro is “off to a very promising start” and that invite requests “remain strong,” without providing specific numbers

“We’re excited by the potential of generative AI technologies, and are looking forward to using these technologies to in-vent new experiences for Astro that will delight customers and make their lives even easier in the future,” the spokesperson said.