San Francisco, California, USA
The Swiss designer Yves Béhar has developed “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.
Moxie by Embodied and fuseproject has been awarded a 2021 Good Design Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies for its ingenuity and elegance.
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 fuseproject.
“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 SocialX™, 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 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.
Designers: fuseproject
Manufacturer: Embodied, Inc
