You come home after a long day of work. You hang up your coat. You toss your briefcase on the couch. A garlicky smell wafts in from the kitchen...
"Honey, I'm home," you say, half-ironically, to whomever your honey is.
You head to the living room, the heels of your shoes echoing loudly throughout the hall.
"Peeqo," you say, "I'm home."
To which your goofy GIF robot replies, cheekily, with something along the lines of:
via GIPHY
Ah, yes. Sorry. We failed to mention at the beginning of that totally realistic scenario that you, dear reader, are the reluctant owner of a tried-and-true GIF robot. Provided, of course, that Peeqo (that's its name) gets fully funded on Kickstarter. It's about a quarter of the way there right now, with little less than a month left. Assuming it gets there, you can purchase one now and have it by September.
Some background: an industrious NYU student, with dreams of making the means of communication between man and machine more whimsical, built the first version of Peeqo as his thesis project. He put up all the details of the design on Reddit, and, as things like this are wont to do, it took off from there. Unsurprisingly, people wanted to build their own Peeqo.
A few years later, here we are, with a sham president and an ailing planet, but also a GIF robot kit, so things are only mostly bad. Thankfully for you, they've made it so any person with a modicum of desire to make a Peeqo can make a Peeqo. You don't even need a screwdriver.
And once it's ready, there's no telling what you can do. Or, well, there is. You basically talk to it, and, using similar voice detection services as the Alexa, it scours the greatest and latest digital GIF emporiums to find a suitable reply, which it shares on its cute little video screen face. It also comes with a bunch of preprogrammed skills, meaning you can use it to play your music, or tell you the weather, or time...whatever it is you need to time. Plus, should your friend (or lover?) get one of these, you'll be able to link them together to send video and GIF responses directly.
Just like you would via text, but hey: robots.
