Embodied, Inc. announces the launch of Moxie, a fun, safe, and engaging animate companion for children designed to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development through everyday play-based learning and captivating content.
Now, more than ever, the importance of technological advancement in at-home learning and care is paramount. Embodied has assembled a world-class team of experts in child development, engineering, technology, game design, and entertainment to create Moxie. Moxie is a robot with machine learning technology that allows it to perceive, process, and respond to natural conversation, eye contact, facial expressions, and other behavior as well as recognize and recall people, places, and things. In creating Moxie, Embodied collaborated with Yves Béhar’s renowned design and innovation firm fuse project.
“We’re at a tipping point in the way we will interact with technology,” said Paolo Pirjanian, CEO and Founder of Embodied, Inc. and former CTO of iRobot. “At Embodied, we have been rethinking and reinventing how human-machine interaction is done beyond simple verbal commands, to enable the next generation of computing, and to power a new class of machines capable of fluid social interaction. Moxie is a new type of robot that has the ability to understand and express emotions with emotive speech, believable facial expressions, and body language, tapping into human psychology and neurology to create deeper bonds.”
Embodied created SocialXTM, a platform that enables children to engage with Moxie through natural interaction (i.e., facial expressions, conversation, body language, etc.), evoking trust, empathy, and motivation as well as deeper engagement to promote developmental skills. With SocialX, Embodied is introducing a whole new category of robots: animate companions. “Animate” means to bring to life and SocialX allows Moxie to embody the very best of humanity in a new and advanced form of technology that can fuel new ways of learning.
With Moxie, children can engage in meaningful play, every day, with content informed by the best practices in child development and early childhood education. Every week is a different theme such as kindness, friendship, empathy, or respect, and children are tasked to help Moxie with missions that explore human experiences, ideas, and life skills. These missions are activities that include creative unstructured play like drawing, mindfulness practice through breathing exercises and meditation, reading with Moxie, and exploring ways to be kind to others. Moxie encourages curiosity so children discover the world and the people around them.
All these activities help children learn and safely practice essential life skills such as turn-taking, eye contact, active listening, emotion regulation, empathy, relationship management, and problem-solving. Embodied has also partnered with Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster to integrate Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary for Children, enabling Moxie to provide age-appropriate definitions and related information to help children learn and understand the meanings of new words and concepts. This is the first of many integrations with Moxie that deliver on Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster’s shared mission to inspire curiosity and the joy of learning.
Embodied developed a full ecosystem that assists parents in supporting their child’s journey with Moxie and allows children to expand their use of Moxie in a safe and parent-approved way: The Embodied Moxie Parent App provides a dashboard to help parents understand their child’s development progress with Moxie. The app will provide key insights into a child’s social, emotional, and cognitive development through their activities with Moxie. The app further provides valuable suggestions and tips to parents to enhance their child’s experience and progress with Moxie. An online child portal site (referred to as the Global Robotics Laboratory, or G.R.L.) provides additional activities, games, and stories that will enhance the experience with Moxie.
Over time, Moxie learns more about the child to better personalize its content to help with individual developmental goals. Embodied has taken careful steps to ensure that information provided by children and families is handled with high standards of privacy and security. Moxie and its full ecosystem will be COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) Safe Harbor certified so parents can feel safe knowing that Moxie employs leading data integrity and security procedures and that its systems are regularly audited to ensure full compliance. Further, personally identifiable data and sensitive information is encrypted with the highest level of security and can only be decrypted by a unique key that only the parent has access to.
