Jibo is dead. Long live Jibo.
Jibo was a cute, social robot that sat in one place in your home. Built in 2014, Jibo was meant to be a robot people brought into their lives before the smart-home industry had even really taken off. (It preceded Amazon’s popular Echo speakers.) It could not interact with objects or move from its spot, but it could wiggle and talk in a way that felt endearing. It was adorable, but not competent or in demand enough to last—it was ahead of its time and died too soon.
Now, Jibo is being reborn, sort of, in a different form. The focus seems far less on the friendly robot and more about making a camera that can turn real-life moments into AI-generated images. A company called Lingverse (formerly known as Ling AI) says it raised $29 million in funding to build a new wearable AI device it calls the iKairos. It can be worn as a pendant or clipped onto your clothes. It can also be placed into a table mount where it sits, Jibo-like, taking in its surroundings.
Details on what exactly it can do are scant, though the company claims you can ask it questions, offload some tasks, and do basically anything modern AI software voice assistant devices can do. Lingverse says the device will likely cost between $199 and $249, likely with a subscription service that offers other AI features.
The name comes from the Greek word Kairos, which loosely translated means “the right moment.” (It also sounds like “Icarus,” the name of the famed figure of Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun. The company says that’s not deliberate.) It was given that name because this moment, namely the generative AI boom, seems better suited to this kind of artificial personal assistant than ever before.
“It's the right time to combine all the stuff,” Jiawei Gu, Lingverse’s CEO, told …. “With iKairos, we are carrying forward Jibo's original dream.”
Exactly what aspects of that original dream iKairos plans to replicate is unclear. While not part of Jibo’s founding team, Gu was a board member before the company went under. Lingverse says the product is made with “the blessing of Jibo’s founding team,” but it does not own the intellectual property rights to Jibo—despite listing Jibo as a “product” on its website. The company says it does hold several of Jibo's core patents, but would not disclose which ones.
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