Amazon’s Astro robot still isn’t ready for prime time

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Enlarge / A limited number of customers have had Astro in their living room. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon's press-only hardware event today included reveals of the Kindle Scribe, Eero extending mesh networks with Echo, updated Echo Dot and Studio speakers, plus an Echo dashboard accessory. Like last year, there was also talk of the Amazon Astro robot that can roll around homes equipped with a digital smile, camera, and microphones. This time, Amazon detailed new and planned features for Astro; however, a year after its initial announcement, Astro remains an invite-only experimental product.

Astro is a 17.3×9.8-inch robot, with Alexa, a smart display, microphones, speakers, night-vision LEDs, a periscope camera, cupholder, and visual simultaneous location and mapping (V-SLAM) for navigating around people's homes and unexpected obstacles, like a dropped item. You need to request an invite to pay $1,000 for the bot. An Amazon rep told Ars Technica that invites are currently sent out at "fairly regular intervals."

Amazon appears to be accepting invite requests while developing new features ahead of expected mass availability, whenever that may be. Amazon's event today didn't provide any updates to Astro seeing general availability. When Ars Technica asked Amazon about when general availability would happen, an Amazon rep wouldn't get more specific than "as quickly as possible."

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