Last week, IEEE Spectrum - the flagship electronic magazine of IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization dedicated to the greatest trends and developments in technology, engineering, and science, reviewed the Ohmni robot!!! And we are thrilled with their feedback about how easy Ohmni is ready to use for anyone, even when the person is non-tech savvy.
The review foused on users' interactions with the robot, and how Ohmni made them feel. The author, Evan Ackerman - a senior writer for IEEE Spectrum’s award-winning robotics blog Automaton, was hoping that the review may help other families to make a better decision about whether they would enjoy using Ohmni or not.
Overall, the review showed that Gerry and his family, who named the Ohmni robot Abner, had a great experience with Ohmni most of the time. They were happy about how fast and easy it was to set up Ohmni right from the shipping box, as well as how much more personal and intimate it was in comparison to a phone call.
They also suggested a few things that needed to improve. And thanks to other beta testers like Gerry’s family, OhmniLabs had the chance to improve our alpha version, whose first batch was shipped last week!
These are some of the enhancements that will be part of the future versions of Ohmni according to Jared Go, OhmniLabs’s CTO and co-founder:
1. We are going to build in tutorials (probably with some embedded videos) on how to drive, dock, etc. right into the onboarding process. We will also link straight to help/instructions while in call so that you can go back and check at any point how to use Ohmni.
2. In our testing, many families had concerns around the privacy matter. But after testing for a week or two, they actually enjoyed having family members to be able to just come over. We have found that the experience is just smoother/better if the family would get used to this. However, we will continue to develop and explore privacy controls that balance usability, ease, and privacy.
3. The top of our priority list is to ensure the quality of the call and the remote control of Ohmni. We should have a fix available soon for all related problems. Our goal is to keep improving to maximize reliability quickly over time.
4. Our auto update system actually is already all cloud-based. The remote person can see what updates are pending for each bot and trigger the update with one click. Both our app as well as OS components and lower level firmware can be updated this way. The web UI for the updates does need more polish within the next few months.
You can find the full review of Ohmni here.