THE ROOMBA GUY'S SECOND ACT: A ROBOT YOU'LL WANT TO SNUGGLE

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Colin Angle, who led iRobot for nearly three decades, has a new startup called Familiar Machines & Magic that is selling a robot designed to help people monitor their loved ones. The robot, called the Familiar, is an expressive, furry creature that can react to people's actions and feelings in an emotionally intelligent way. It is still in an early prototype stage, so there's no information about price or availability, but videos of the current iteration of the product are available in the article. The Familiar will use local small models to process requests and won't send any data to the cloud.