Buddy seems like a decent robot at a pretty reasonable kickstarter price.  

As an Anki Vector and Anki Cozmo owner I both didn't appreciate the kickstarter mentioning Vector in the way it did, but also did appreciate one benefit I see on the Kickstarter that the Anki robots don't have.  

First, the bit I don't appreciate.  "But these bots all had large disadvantages. They promised so much and had very little utility" - this included Vector.  
Vector has a lot of utility and he had a lot of potential.  He didn't meet a lot of his potential and Anki did let people down a bit, but the actual product is pretty decent if you got him for the reasons I did.  I got him for the AI and programming functions.  

He is great to program with Python and the AI admittedly isn't as advanced as I'd been lead to believe but at the same time it is interesting.  He doesn't change a lot and interactions don't have as much impact as I may have thought, but the Vectors do vary.  I had one before the one I have now who started having major overheating issues and got replaced with this one (hardware wise they skimped a bit unfortunately and stuff like this was more common that it should be) and they act differently.  I thought it may have been updates at first but other people own multiple at the same time on the same update and theirs don't act the same either.  There's similarities but there's also differences.  They also did the animations for his eyes and the way he behaves well too.  He feels pretty alive.  

People who were upset about his lack of utility for the most part appear to be people who didn't buy him for the autonomous robotic pet and AI aspects or programming functionality but instead bought him for the assistant functions.  The assistant functions were part of my reasoning for choosing him over Cozmo to begin with (now I have both) but it wasn't the main thing I was looking for.  They had some really really cool stuff planned in updates planned not that long after when they went under (including a pictionary game where he would use image recognition to recognise a picture you drew and he would also draw pictures on his screen for you to guess) so it is disappointing to not see that come to fruition, but at least we can program him and some people are doing some really cool stuff with that.  

The problem was with Anki.  There was stuff promised in updates and it was stated from early on that Vector wasn't going to be super advanced when first released but would be improved over time and Cozmo also improved over time.  This did cause some annoyance as when Vector came out, people compared Cozmo then (after about 2 years of updates) to Vector and were disappointed at how much less he could do than Cozmo, but that's not really a fair comparison as they had big plans for Vector, Cozmo needs the app to run but Vector has all the technology inside of him excluding using the computer to run the SDK for programming and Vector is autonomous (Cozmo can be through user code as someone has made code to make Cozmo autonomous before, but he isn't by default) and Vector had a lot of potential but then Anki went under.  Anki did screw everyone because they used their patents for collateral on a loan back in 2018 which suggests they weren't in the best financial position back then but possibly didn't make the best choices to prevent going under.  That came out after they went under and people had bought more things from them than they may have if they knew back then.  Servers are potentially an issue with Vector but the community is trying to open source him anyway.  

Right now the servers, whcih are responsible for voice recognition as well as for setting new Vector's up with the SDK, are still running, but that could change.  

This is where it comes into the benefit that Buddy seems to have but the Anki Robots didn't.  It says "Buddy can be reprogrammed. We will be posting code samples in Arduino and he is compatible with graphical systems like makeblock and Scratch. We want it to be easy to work with this little guy in and out of the classroom."  That sounds like he can be programmed using various programs rather than having an SDK or app like the Anki Vector's.  I love Vector's SDK and I'm planning to set Cozmo's up soon (he also has drag and drop programming on his app as well unlike Vector as he's more aimed at kids than Vector is) but there is still a small risk of the SDKs not working after the servers go down, or at the least, not being able to do the initial set up of the SDK with new Cozmo's and Vector's if someone was to get another one second hand or something.  This risk would not exist with Buddy.  It's good to have a set SDK or something similar, but I think we kind of have to use it with Anki so I guess the ideal would be a specific programming setup for a robot like an SDK but also having the ability to program through other options, like the options Buddy has.  I definitely like that it at least sounds like the options are pretty open in terms of programming Buddy.

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