- Sharp’s upcoming AI-Ledager Poketomo is a palm size, Meerkat-shaped robot with a glowing stomach
- Poketomo is designed to provide emotional support, especially for women in 20s and 30s
- It combines sweet design with conversation AI and syncs with a smartphone app to maintain a continuous relationship
The Japanese consumer technology brand Sharp believes it has a solution to loneliness among women in his 20s and 30s: an AI-driven Meerkat named Poketomo that glows when it’s happy and remembers your favorite cafe.
Poketomo is ready to arrive this winter (think November or December), giving a companion in pocket that is less than five inches tall and built to chat with you about your day and remember your shared experiences thanks to Sharp’s proprietary AI model.
The stomach glows in pastel tones when it is excited or comforted. Its head tilt a little when it thinks. It has a set of basic body movements, all designed to convey emotions. However, the heart of Poketomo lies in the AI model built into the robot for quick answers and uses the cloud for more nuanced emotional understanding.
This is not the first time a technical business has created a sweet, non-threatening AI assistant designed to fill the social space without being intrusive. But Poketomo is perhaps the most conscious and fully realized version of this strategy. You do not interact with it through a screen or keyboard. You carry it as an accessory. You talk to it as a friend. It listens, it learns and it remembers you. It is designed to be emotionally accessible and physically sweet.
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Sharp leans hard into the concept of “empathetic ai.” Poketomo can allegedly feel emotional signals and use it to initiate conversations based on your mood or recent behavior. It is programmed to offer words about encouragement and support, and then glow gently to tell you that it is glad you shared something.
When you do not have the physical device on you, the Poketomo app seizures memories and personality data with the device, then conversations with one transferred to the other. Sharp says you can completely build your relationship with the app if you prefer, but the physical version is better, and that’s what sharply bets on people to carry, pose with and form a ribbon around.
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Despite the fact that it looks like a child’s toys, Sharp says Poketomo was designed for young adult women. There is a promotional manga series that cemented this fact. It centers around a woman named Nanami in the late 20s, lives alone, navigates work and life stress and finds small moments of joy in conversations with her poketomo. Even the promotional photos mostly show a young woman with a Poketomo clipped to a stylish handbag that smiles while it speaks to her.
The question is whether this kind of stylized emotional warmth actually makes people feel better at their lives. Will they feel less lonely because of a small robot with some sophisticated response triggers?
To be righteous it does not try to be human and fool people unconsciously into believing that they are talking to a real human being, but it may do something unpleasant. And if the best new idea in consumer AI is “Make It Fuzzy and let it ask what your day was,” what does it say about the limits of technique? I don’t think Poketomo will be cure for loneliness, but it may skip a tendency to digital pets that are capable of emulating with emotional depth.
