Amazon announced its long-rumored $999 Astro home robot on Tuesday. I had a chance to check it out in a demo with Amazon last week and wanted to share a few thoughts on what Astro is, what it can and can’t do and why Amazon decided to build a home robot.
Astro seems like a strange gadget for Amazon to launch. The company is best known as an online store. And most of its operating profit comes from its AWS cloud business. Notably, Astro is a “Day 1 Edition” product, which means it won’t be sold to everyone at first. Instead, Amazon will ask people to sign up and then invite them to order the robot. That allows Amazon to avoid building too many gadgets it won’t sell and a public flop like the Amazon Fire Phone that was discontinued in 2015.
Amazon said Astro will go on sale later this year but did not give a specific launch date. (It’s worth noting that Amazon has made similar promises about future products that either never launched or were severely delayed.)
So, why robots?
Amazon Astro home robot
Todd Haselton | CNBC
“We get together every once in a while and we organize a senior team meeting around ‘what are some of the changes in technology?'” Amazon’s vice president of product Charlie Tritschler told me. “And we talked about AI and processors getting more powerful and inevitably robotics came up. And one of the discussions was: ‘Does anyone here in this meeting think that in 5-10 years there won’t be more robots in your home?’ And everyone was like ‘well yeah, of course.’ It’s like, well then let’s going.”
Tritschler said Astro brings together a lot of what Amazon already offers in other products.
“We’ve got a decade-plus with what we’ve done in fulfillment centers,” Tritschler said of the company’s industrial robots that cart products through its warehouses. “But then all of the things we’ve done in devices and Amazon Prime Video and Alexa and home monitoring, and we had so many things we could pull together.”
That’s a good representation of what I saw in the demo.
Amazon’s Astro robot
What is Astro?
Astro is about the size of a small dog. It roams around your house on three wheels, including two big ones that prevent it from getting stuck and a smaller one for rotating. It has a camera that rises up on a 42-inch arm that can keep an eye on your home as Astro patrols while you’re away. It can follow you around and play music or display TV shows on its 10-inch touchscreen. It can recognize faces (if you want it to) so you can load up two sodas in the back storage compartment and tell Astro to go to someone in the living room.
Astro is like a combo of lots of Amazon’s other gadgets placed on wheels. The cameras can be used for home security or for video chat, sort of combining Amazon’s Ring cameras with its Echo Show smart screens. The cameras are also used to create a map of your house when you set Astro up for the first time. You can talk to Astro much like you’d talk to an Echo or Alexa (you can change the name to Alexa if you want) to get sports scores or the weather. And you can play movies or TV shows like you would on an Amazon tablet or Fire TV.
Astro can carry things in this cubby. You can also add accessories, like a cupholder or an Omron blood pressure monitor.
Todd Haselton | CNBC
I also saw how you can control Astro remotely from a phone app, which is useful if you want to keep an eye on a loved one who lives alone, like an aging family member. Tritschler told me Amazon will also sell a third-party insert made by Omron that fits into the back storage compartment and can hold a blood pressure cuff. That will allow folks to control Astro remotely and remind people who live alone to check their blood pressure, which seems useful and opens Astro up to an audience outside of just gadget-geeks who want a home robot.
But Astro doesn’t have arms or hands so, it can’t pick things up. It’s not quite the level of Rosie from “The Jetsons” TV show. (Speaking of that show, Astro is not named after the Jetsons’ dog. Early testers just preferred that name over others.) It also can’t go up or down stairs, so it’s really only good for one floor of a house.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if manipulation could do more? Could you have an arm that picks things up off the floor or tidies up or brings you drinks? But when we looked at technologies and the cost and complexity of those technologies today, and reliability at the consumer level, they’re just not there yet,” Tritschler said. “And we realized, hey, this is a journey, we don’t have to do everything in the first product. So we focused here on mobility, intelligent motion, visual ID, and some of the other really tough challenges we had to overcome.”
The periscope camera that rises out of the Amazon Astro robot.
Todd Haselton | CNBC
I’m torn on how I feel about the Astro.
On one hand, wow, it’s cool that we finally have a home robot, even if it can’t clean up and bring me stuff from the fridge. On the other, I can’t really think of many reasons why I’d need one in my house at its current price, other than as a conversation starter or for home security since a roaming robot seems like it would be effective.
I think Astro will be most compelling for people who want to keep an eye on loved ones who live alone, and who might find it useful to call over a robot with their medicine inside, or a blood pressure monitor sitting in its cubby.
Sensors on the front of the Astro robot help it avoid running into stuff.
Todd Haselton | CNBC
Tritschler said Amazon is bullish on robots, though, and made it clear this is just the first one. Amazon has a lot of ideas on how to make them even better. I knocked the Amazon Echo when it first launched in 2014. Now millions of people have one in their homes. Maybe the same will be true for Astro in 10 years. That’s Amazon’s goal.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he wants to integrate ChatGPT artificial intelligence capabilities into the travel platform but the software isn’t ready.
“The [software development kit] wasn’t quite robust enough for the things we want to do,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.
Chesky said the company would “probably” want to integrate ChatGPT eventually.
Airbnb on Tuesday launched a series of new social features, such as direct messaging, to its platform. The update also included a personalized version of the company’s chatbot launched earlier this year that can cancel and change reservations for users in North America.
In an interview with Bloomberg this week, Chesky said that the OpenAI chatbot isn’t “quite ready” for integration with Airbnb. He said the model was made using 13 different chatbots and that Airbnb is depending heavily on Alibaba’s Qwen model.
Chesky, who is a close friend of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said it’s only the beginning of the AI revolution and he expects the technology to fuel a consumer app craze over the next few years.
“We’re all going to have to work together,” he said. “AI is going to lift up a lot of companies. If they want to vertically integrate every single thing, that’s going to be very, very difficult.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.
The company announced the cuts in a memo from its Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit and other product-related positions will be impacted.
Meta has been aggressively investing in AI as it works to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google, pouring billions of dollars into infrastructure projects and recruitment.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $27 billion deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund and develop its massive Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana. The data center is expected to be large enough to cover a “significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post in July.
A new Volkswagen ID.3 electric car prepares to pass final inspection at the Volkswagen plant on May 14, 2025 in Dresden, Germany.
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
German auto giant Volkswagen on Wednesday warned of temporary production outages citing China’s export restrictions on semiconductors made by Nexperia.
The update comes shortly after the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), the country’s main car industry lobby, said the China-Netherlands dispute over Nexperia could lead to “significant production restrictions in the near future” if the supply interruption of chips cannot be swiftly resolved.
A spokesperson for Volkswagen told CNBC by email that while Nexperia is not a direct supplier of the company, some Nexperia parts are used in its vehicle components, which are supplied by Volkswagen’s direct suppliers.
“We are in close contact with all relevant stakeholders in light of the current situation to identify potential risks at an early stage and to be able to make decisions regarding any necessary measures,” a Volkswagen spokesperson said, noting that the firm’s production is currently unaffected.
“However, given the evolving circumstances, short-term effects on production cannot be ruled out,” they added.
Shares of Volkswagen traded 2.2% lower at 2 p.m. London time (9 a.m. ET).
Last month, the Dutch government took control of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned semiconductor maker based in the Netherlands, in what was seen as a highly unusual move.
The Dutch government seized control of the company, which specializes in the high-volume production of chips used in automotive, consumer electronics and other industries, citing fears the firm’s tech “would become unavailable in an emergency.”
China responded by blocking exports of the firm’s finished products, sparking alarm among Europe’s auto industry.
A spokesperson for Germany’s Economy Ministry said the government is concerned about chip supply chain difficulties, according to Reuters.