Colin Angle, the co-founder of iRobot and the engineer behind the Roomba vacuum, has revealed his next venture: a dog-sized robotic companion built around generative AI and designed to form lasting emotional connections with the people it lives alongside.
The robot, developed under Angle’s new company called Familiar Machines & Magic, takes the form of a deliberately unidentifiable quadruped creature, drawing visual references from bears, barn owls, and golden retrievers without committing to any single animal, a design choice intended to prevent owners from arriving with fixed expectations about what the device can and cannot do.
Internally codenamed Ami and publicly referred to as a Familiar, the robot carries 23 degrees of freedom across its head, neck, ears, eyes, and eyebrows, producing expression and body language as its primary communication channel rather than speech, with the team opting against voice output to avoid the factual accuracy pitfalls that have complicated other consumer AI products.
An Nvidia Jetson Orin chip powers the onboard processing, running a custom multimodal model that combines vision, audio, language, and memory without requiring a cloud connection, a deliberate decision Angle frames around both privacy and response latency for a device intended to operate continuously within a family living space.
Angle identifies families with young children, elderly users living alone, and people experiencing chronic loneliness as the Familiar’s primary target groups, with the robot designed to encourage physical activity, nudge owners toward healthier routines, and provide tactile interaction through a touch-sensitive exterior coat rather than screen-based engagement.
The company has assembled its engineering team from Boston Dynamics, Bose, Disney, MIT, and Sonos, with Angle describing the project as the fulfilment of his original ambition when founding iRobot in 1990 under the name Artificial Creatures Inc., before the technology existed to make the concept viable.
No firm release date has been confirmed beyond a target of sometime next year, with pricing described only as comparable to the ongoing costs of pet ownership rather than a fixed retail figure.
