Automaton

Photo: Ugobe

Spectrum senior editor Tekla S. Perry and her kids—ages 9, 12, and 16—adopted a ­dinosaur for two weeks. We're talking about Pleo, the AI-powered toy dino. The kids, who quickly decided that Pleo was a girl, liked its realistic movements and sounds. But Perry thinks the robot needs better batteries—and a behavior software update. The Perry family is keeping the cats.

The brainchild of Ugobe, a robotics ­company in Emeryville, Calif., Pleo looks and acts the way you’d expect a baby Camarasaurus to, thanks to ­sophisticated ­robotics. She has two 32-bit and four 8‑bit ­microprocessors, ­fourteen motors, a ­camera, two ­microphones, eight ­sensors under her ­rubberized skin, a tilt ­sensor, an infrared mouth sensor, fourteen force-­feedback sensors, and four switches in her feet.

First, the good: the ­movement and sounds are indeed amazing. My ­daughter handed Pleo to a friend to cuddle, and Pleo nestled in and wrapped her tail securely around the friend’s arm, completely freaking her out. Our cats considered Pleo real and scary—they ran for cover whenever we tried to get them to meet her.

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When I first saw Pleo two years ago, at a conference for emerging technologies, I was impressed by Ugobe’s claim that the dinosaur would develop a personality based on how it was treated. But now the company says it will provide most of that malleability only later, via free software updates.

Read the entire review, and for a look under the skin of Pleo, here's a video showing how its sensors work.