Amazon is working on a secret AI home robot that can understand things and monitor whether kids had friends over after school

Amazon's home robot Astro Amazon

• Amazon is working on a new home robot that comes with ChatGPT-like AI features.
• Potential uses include identifying an unattended burning stove, or which of your kids' friends came over after school.
• The upgrade would be another example of Amazon incorporating generative AI into its products

Amazon's Astro home robot is up for a major upgrade, with ChatGPT-like features that can help it observe and understand things like a human does, Insider has learned.

The upgrade is codenamed "Burnham" and aims to enable Astro and other related products to engage in a Q&A dialogue on what it saw and understood, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. New devices based on Burnham, like the next-generation Astro, will use large language model-based technology commonly found in apps like ChatGPT, and take appropriate action based on that.

Some of the new capabilities Astro will gain:

• Monitor whether the kids had friends over after school
• Identify a stove left burning or a water faucet running unattended, and bring it to the owner's attention
• Check on a human who has slipped and fallen, such as an elderly person, to make sure the person's ok, and call others to come help.
• Find keys if Astro owners ask where they left them.
• Check whether the kitchen window was left open last night
• Detect broken glass on the floor and understand that glass shards are dangerous and need to be swept up before someone steps on it

The upgrade would give a much-needed push for Astro, one of the most ambitious device launches at Amazon that so far appears to have failed to live up to expectations. 

It's also the latest example of Amazon adding generative AI and LLM technology into its existing products and services, following the explosive popularity of chatbot sensation ChatGPT.

Burnham may not be limited to just the one robot product either. In one of the internal documents, Amazon defines Burnham as a "set of core technologies — not a product in itself," and says it expects Burnham to "appear in a series of future robots."

Read the full story: Leaked documents show Amazon is working on a secret home robot with ChatGPT-like features that 'remembers what it saw and understood'

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