Moxie Robot

Welp, here we are. We've officially entered the world of AI chatbot robots for kids marketed to help build emotional intelligence, health habits, and strong relationships. Embodied, the makers of Moxie, claim is endless compassion and unlimited patience for your small child. That's all cool...anything to helps kids grow up to be outstanding people is nice. But is an AI chatbot robot with AI driven by OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, the best way to teach your kids that. Especially since Embodied also tells parents in their privacy policy to, "Please help us protect your children’s privacy by teaching your child to never provide personal information without your permission." We're not sure how an AI robot teaches emotional intelligence and strong relationships when the kids aren't supposed to share any personal information? Also, is it realistic to expect a child to understand the concept of never providing personal information to their robot friend? We're not quite about that expectation from Moxie's makers.

When its LED bar is blue, Moxie is listening. And, hey, just because Moxie the magical robot is almost the exact premise of a horror movie released last year, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a scary technology! The makers of Moxie do take extra care to keep images and recordings of your child private, that’s good. But when it comes to your kid’s activities and chat transcripts with Moxie? Well, we hope what they’re doing to protect those is good enough too.

Video recordings and images of your child don’t leave Moxie, but data from them do. Embodied, Inc’s privacy policy says that once they are transformed into “Facial Expression Datapoints” and “User Image Datapoints” locally that the originals are automatically deleted. Embodied says they keep that information but not which user they belong to.

Recordings of your youngster’s little voice that Moxie “hears” are handled differently. Buckle up because there’s a few steps. The audio recording is sent to Google Cloud STT (Speech-to-Text) where it’s transcribed (and becomes “Audio Transcript Data”) and sent back to Moxie. Moxie tries to come up with an answer based on Embodied’s language processor. If it doesn’t know what to say, then some of that transcript can be sent to OpenAI – who apparently always has an answer. Then OpenAI’s answer is “filtered” by Embodied before Moxie says that response to your child. Now, Embodied says that neither Google or OpenAI stores any of that information, but also suggests that you read both privacy policies to learn how your personal information is treated by those companies. Hmm. That worries us a bit because OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, doesn't have the best track record for data privacy.

Like other household robots, you can bring Moxie in and out of standby mode with magic words, “Hello Moxie” or “Moxie, please wake up” and “Moxie please go to sleep” to end the interaction. When Moxie is listening, “anyone in range of the video or audio recording capabilities of Moxie may be recorded, including your child, members of your family or others in the home at the time the robot is recording.” That could make for an awkward conversation if Moxie rolls in while you’re gossiping with the neighbor. Especially since kids don’t always remember to put their toys away when they’re done playing. It's worth having a glance at Moxie’s LED bar – lavender means standby (not recording).

Besides what your child (or anyone else) says to Moxie, Embodied can also collect information about how your kiddo interacts with their new robot friend–like whether they hug Moxie (Moxie Interaction Data), what games they play together (Activity Data), and what Embodied interprets all that to mean about your child’s development (Insight Data). All that information is stored together (except for Activity Data), anonymously in the cloud. We should remind you now that cloud storage does come with a certain degree of risk and that anonymized data can be easy to re-identify. Especially, we would think, depending on what your child tells Moxie about their home and life. (In this demo one of the first questions Moxie asks is, “where is ‘here’?” And in this testimonial, Moxie is compared to an "interactive journal.") And remember, according to Embodied it’s actually on you, the parent, to make sure that your child “never provide[s] personal information [to Moxie] without your permission.” Oof. As someone who has talked to a child before, I can tell you that would be a tall order. To be fair, it seems like Embodied mostly uses that information to help Moxie interact with your child and report on their progress to you. Still, they do have access. And Moxie’s privacy policy says it can also be analyzed by their AI platform and used to “improve the AI.”

Moxie also collects account information about the little mentors and their parents through their Parent App which walks you through the “parental verification process” with a third party called PRIVO. It’s a way of making sure that children have their parents’ permission before they gab it up with their bionic buddy. That’s the law in the US for apps that collect information from kids (COPPA). Moxie is compliant with it. That’s also where parents will find the secret keys– the recovery key and Analytics User ID– they need to access or delete information linked to their little one. Through the app, you can technically take back your consent for Embodied to collect your child’s data through Moxie, but that means it’s lights out for Moxie, who would be “render[ed] inoperable” by this. Not much of a choice given that $800 (on sale) is a heck-of-a-lot for an analog toy. This consent to share data thing actually worries us a good bit.

There’s much to consider with Moxie. Can a five-year-old consent to having their conversations with their friend recorded and analyzed? Can you trust the OpenAI, the artificial intelligence that is the driving force behind Moxie’s personality? Sidenote: we were keen to learn more about that, but the page FAQ: Artificial Intelligence and Moxie is blank. The moral questions with Moxie make us wistful for a simpler time for toys, where the “talking” Teddy Ruxpin was cutting edge. Then again, his box didn’t promise to decrease your child’s anxiety in social settings or improve their emotional intelligence. Those are really good things! So if you do accept all that, then the worst thing that could happen is that your child confides in Moxie and then that transcript is exposed and re-identified, revealing to the world your big secret: that you've been passing off grocery store cookies as homemade... Or maybe something even more personal than that? We sure hope that isn’t likely since Embodied seems to have some serious cybersecurity measures in place. Still, their privacy policy also warns, "While Embodied works hard to protect your information, no security method is 100% secure. Thus, Embodied cannot guarantee that the security methods and/or precautions we take are failure proof.
" Yeah, we have to say that this little AI chat robot for little children is kinda creepy. We were really on the fence about giving Moxie our *Privacy Not Included warning label. We decided to err on the side of caution and not give it that, but it was REALLY close. We do think parents should be very careful with Moxie if the care about their prvacy and their child's privacy at all.