SKIRMISHER

Just as when we had already settled with the idea of the Echo as a clever robot that gets a raging hard-on whenever it detects other hot, Echo-toting people nearby, here’s Andrew from the robot’s development team correcting our naughty mistake.

He says:

Echo is meant as a way to connect people with common interests for any reason, not just romantic ones. For instance, maybe you’re new to town and looking for other curling fanatics, and your coworker happens to be one. Or you want to strike up a conversation with the teenager across the hall but didn’t know she was interested in W3C standards. Or you’re looking for a typography expert for your project and the fellow across the lunch table is just that.

It’s like having a mutual friend introduce you, in a way. We’re hoping that they’ll nudge people to go up and strike up conversations more, facilitating human interaction instead of taking over it. Think of it as something like a physical implementation of social networking.

The teddy bear thing is also not a given (although a lot of people seem to think it’s kind of cute) - we’re experimenting with many different form factors, including non-robotic things like PDAs and cell phones.

It turns out, Echo’s own blog lists and debunks misconceptions, such as the following:

1. All Echoes are bears. As much as we love Ursidae, we’re fans of other form factors as well. (Gui, for instance, has a thing for baby seals.) The teddy bear just happened to be the first prototype we made; we’re working on other animals and humanoids in the lab right now and plan to explore non-character form factors (for instance, an Echo on your cell phone or a conference badge) in the future.
2. Echoes are matchmakers for the socially impaired. We consider ourselves pretty social people, and we’d like to use them too! As Joe said in our reply to Engadget, we think the real power of Echo is in non-romantic matchings; we’d like to help people find new friends, collaborators, and business partners as well. (However, if an Echo ends up introducing you to the love of your life, that’s great - let us know and we’ll celebrate with you.)
3. An Echo is only useful if other people have them too. We’re trying to design Echoes so that they’re compelling little robots with other functionalities in their own right outside of the local social networking system. There’s only a single functioning Echo prototype right now, but people have been crowding around it wherever we’ve taken it, so we think it’s going quite well on that front.

We hope this finally clarifies many things. But we have to admit the sex part would be one of its most compelling selling points.

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