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WHY OLLY IS DIFFERENT
Each Olly is unique because you are unique
A ground-breaking AI engine allows each Olly to develop a unique personality, connecting with you on a highly personalised level.
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Olly learns. You don't have to ask
Proactivity* is one of Olly’s most unique features. Olly understands your patterns and schedules, processes the information based on context then acts on the information before you have to ask. Olly learns to be proactive in two ways: user defined and contextual awareness.
*Don't worry, you have the full control. Olly will only be proactive under your permission.![]()
User Defined
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One way to teach Olly is to literally train Olly. For example, simply say "Hey Olly, tell me the weather in the morning." Olly will remember this and tell you the weather forecast automatically the next morning. You can train Olly to tell you the news, traffic, your calendar events etc.
Contextual Awareness
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Olly recognizes your routines and executes the most relevant and useful actions, such as play your favorite music and set the temperature to the right degree at the right time. To add to the experience, Olly draws connections to your calendar, email, TFL, news, BBC and so on. This gives Olly optimal information to better assist you.
Like mentioned before, if this is not your thing, you have the full control.
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FEATURES (UPDATED 2.11.2017)
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A Perfect Fit
Based on your needs and personality, we do our best to match you with an Olly that will complement your lifestyle. No matter if you are an artist, a teacher, an engineer or an athlete there's an Olly for you.
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OLLY'S SCIENCE AND INNOVATION
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Emotional Character Engine
Olly understands your facial expressions, vocal intonations, and verbal patterns. So whether you are happy or sad, Olly sees it and hears it. This understanding allows Olly to move and talk to you in an unprecedented way.
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Vision-enhanced Natural Voice Interaction
Olly interacts with people in a more natural way similar to how a person might. Olly does not only hear, but it can also see. Olly will proactively start a conversation rather than just reacting to a command.
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Multimodal User-recognition
Olly recognises people through visual and audio detection/by voice and by image. The two combined techniques work together to improve recognition rates. This is the foundation of Olly’s proactivity.
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Don't forget to bring your umbrella.
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Action/activity Recognition & Forecasting
Olly not only recognises what you’re doing, but can also learn the intention behind it. Subsequently, Olly is able to anticipate situations and offer helpful suggestions.
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Scene Understanding & Vision-augmented Beam-forming
Hearing you clearly across the room is important. Olly therefore uses vision to enhance its beamforming microphone array technology. Olly scans and analyses the surrounding environment to identify the room type and any potential obstacles between itself and you, so it can focus on you better.
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Expressive Visual Interaction System
Olly communicates with you using a custom built circular LED display with a design language that is as visually unique as every Olly, yet understandable due to its shared core patterns.
INSIDE OLLY:
CUTTING-EDGE INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY
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OLLY MAKES YOUR SMART HOME, SMARTER
Olly is designed to seamlessly connect with your home’s most popular apps and smart devices and to listen to Internet radio.
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PRE-ORDER NOW!
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PROJECT TIMELINE
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WE ARE EMOTECH
Emotech, the team behind Olly is made up of an incredibly talented and diverse group of individuals who all share a common goal: to create technology that’s more human － technology that we can truly connect with, that understands us, and that ultimately improves our lives through innovative and more personal interactions.
To bring Olly to life, we’ve assembled world-leading AI-scientists and researchers from the fields of machine learning, speech technology, and computer vision, as well as neuroscientists, psychologists, highly experienced software and hardware engineers, game designers, animation and sound artists and globally integrated marketing specialists. At Emotech, we come from over 20 countries and now work in London, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Armenia, Taipei, and Shenzhen.
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ENDORSEMENT
John Shawe-Taylor Director, Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning, UCL
Jason Rentfrow Director of Studies in PBS, University of Cambridge
Yvonne Rogers Professor of Interaction Design, the Director of UCLIC, UCL
Suzi Perry
Suzi Perry is an English television presenter best known for the BBC for 13 years.
"We are really excited to see Olly come to life. We worked with the Emotech team to help setup a solid process to review and vet their manufacturing partner and lay the foundation to ensure a smooth handover to production." - Scott N. Miller, CEO, Dragon Innovation, Inc.
As Featured In
THE MAKING OF AND EARLY CONCEPTS
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Wake up, Olly!
In September 2016, Olly stood up for the first time. Back then, it was merely a mechanical prototype that could not respond. Only 3 months later, Olly could hear and recognise our voice! Although acting a bit slow, Olly was able to rise and turn to find us! Earlier this year, Olly made another huge progress. From 8 meters away, it did not only wake up but also greeted us!
LED Iterations
Olly communicates through visual language, which is currently one of the most innovative technologies displayed by any robot on the market. Albeit not the only element, Olly’s LED are the key component of its interaction with the owner. Our engineers, developers and designers cannot recount the many iterations and tweaks necessary to achieve the LED effects you see today. We've come such a long way! And we thoroughly enjoyed the process because we genuinely care about providing you with the possible user experience!
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OLLY IS READY TO MEET YOU
Bringing Olly to life has been a joint collaboration between AI researchers, human psychologists and neuroscientists. We’ve refined and perfected Olly across numerous prototypes to get to where we are today. Olly is now finally ready to go. We’re hugely excited to introduce Olly to the world and recruit the first owners to shape the personality of Olly, a robot that views the world more like a human than a machine.
We commenced factory preparations in 2016, and are now waiting for the launch of our crowdfunding campaign to secure our manufacturing partner. With final testing and production scheduled for March 2018, pre-orders will be shipped in February to ensure you’re amongst one of the very first to experience Olly.
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WHAT WE NEED AND WHAT YOU GET
Through crowdfunding we’re giving you the chance to be one of the world’s first owners of Olly. You’ll not only get to experience the first robot with a personality, with lifetime free Olly system upgrades, you’ll also be playing a part in shaping the future of Olly itself. More importantly, you will be involved in creating a new world of AI and encouraging our society to embrace this new technology.
We’re looking for owners who’ll give us updates on their life with Olly, helping us to ensure every Olly is as uniquely brilliant as possible.
Olly can’t wait to meet you and empower your daily life.
IMPACT
Emotech’s mission is to improve the relationship between humans and technology. Which is where you come in. We’re giving tech-lovers the technology to help make this happen. By becoming a proud owner of Olly, you can help us to create a better product and shape the future of Olly's development.
We want Olly to be an open platform. The more people who use Olly, the better Olly will become. We want our developers to have some fun with this project too, challenging them to create new software and hardware that pushes the existing boundaries of technology.To increase Olly’s skillset, we seek more talents from AI, design, voice and sound innovation and the medical field.
As a start-up, there’s a rebellious spirit that runs throughout Emotech. We’re looking for backers who share that spirit. Those who want to disrupt the ‘expected’ and help us create a more diverse AI world.
RISKS AND CHALLENGES
There are risks with production at every step of the way, but luckily for you, we've done all the hard work of getting a product through the tooling process and getting ready to scale. Our team of experts, including the former head of manufacturing for Pebble, have been getting Olly ready for action since February 2017, We’ve also teamed up with the clever folk at Dragon Innovation, with several versions of Olly already completed. It’s the reason we’re super confident that the Olly you pre-order will be of the highest quality.
We are using Indiegogo as a way to validate our product. We want your help to scale the production process and get all units ready to ship. However, due to the complexity of Olly’s components being produced across the globe, there may be slight delays to the originally planned delivery times.
Also, being as smart as Olly doesn’t come cheap. We’re using the very best quality materials and technology, from the super-powerful CPU to the high-quality microphone arrays and gears ensuring superb sound quality and smooth movement. It means that Olly will be ready to impress right from day one. We know the pricing might reduce the number of backers who support us. But those who do will receive a truly state-of-the-art robot assistant (Olly told us to say that).
HELP OUT BY SHARING WITH FRIENDS!
Do you have a friend who would be interested in Olly? Want to share? Just 30 seconds of your time could make a difference in growing our community. Hit one of the buttons below and tag a friend or coworker who needs Olly!
The more people who know about us, the larger our community will become.
Let’s do this.
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How to contact us:
General inquiries: info@emotech.co
Open platform and SDK: ollylab@emotech.co
Support inquiries: support@emotech.co
Investment and press: chelseac@emotech.co
Wholesale: sales@emotech.co
Career: julia@emotech.co
FAQ
About Emotech
1. Who created it?
We are a London-based start-up working on the innovative personal robot Olly, the first robot with personality. We have been selected as one of the Top 14 Start-up teams in Europe for Disrupt London by TechCrunch. BBC News and TechCrunch have reported that we have been named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree in four categories for our smart lifestyle assistant Olly Robot, a first for any startup product.
The inspiration for Olly came from the realisation that AI could be developed which would have a personality based on its users’ preferences and patterns, and that is where the name Emotech comes from, Emotion+Technology.
2. What makes Olly different compared to other AI devices?
Olly does what others don’t. Problems with current AI products are 1) Reactive rather than proactive. 2) Voice only, cannot detect its surroundings. 3. One-size-fits-all, i.e. lack of personalisation / customisation.
Olly is more than a robot. It is the first robot with personality. Day by day it gets to know your life patterns and begins to shape its personality to match yours. Olly is the only robot with a real learning system; its great uniqueness lies in its proactivity. We have been preparing for manufacturing for a few months now, which means that we are confident the delivery will be of superb quality.
3. Why do personality and emotions matter for robots?
Emotion is the future of AI. Adding personalities and emotions isn’t just a fun experiment: it will help create virtual and physical robots that communicate more naturally. Emotions also aid in making computers smarter by offering motivational reminders and unconventional suggestions to encourage problem-solving.
4. Why order now?
By backing now you'll get to own one of the very first Ollies off the line plus exclusive access to prices only available during the Indiegogo campaign.
About Usage
5. What if you wanted to change your morning routine (for example), can you re-set?
Olly will do its best to use the whole available contextual information (the scope of which is fully controlled by the user) to quickly spot and adapt to changing user conditions. If some manual intervention is still necessary, Olly is always ready to listen to your feedback.
6. Can Olly speak other languages?
Olly speaks English for now in either a British or American accent and has a male or female voice. Our team is currently working on different languages, which will enter the testing phase by the end of this year.
7. Will the voices be changed?
Yes, Olly presently has two voices (male and female, British and American) and we will release more characteristic voices later.
8. Will Olly become like a robot version of me?
Olly won’t become like a robot version of you but it will continuously learn your preferences to proactively communicate with you and respond to your needs.
9. Will Olly watch me sleep?
Olly has two cameras, which means Olly can interact with you in both “awake” and “sleep” mode. For example, Olly knows when you come home and can talk to you proactively; Olly knows you are doing a push-up, and can cheer you on. But please don’t worry about your privacy as Olly doesn’t upload images or any raw data anywhere, and you can even turn off this proactivity feature of Olly if you prefer.
10. How many people can use one Olly device?
Olly feels best in home environments, and can recognise and offer a unique experience for each household member independently, up to 6 people.
11. Can you link multiple Ollies together, so you have constant coverage around your home?
Ollies on the same network (within the same environment) can exchange data.
12. How long does it take to set-up an Olly?
Olly is very easy to set up. It comes together with a mobile app, through which you have to connect it to your wireless network. After that, you can log in with services such as, Gmail, Calendar, Music providers, etc., to increase the experience you will get out of Olly.
About Data Security
13. Where does the data go?
We are very aware of the importance of our users' privacy, and life at home is intimate and personal. We believe the best way to protect user’s data is by giving the users full control of their data and to follow all the official standards on data privacy in each and every country where the product is released. We don’t offer data to third parties, however, as everyone else, we would like to use some of the collected data to improve Olly and in doing so we will follow the golden standards behind data collection and storage, including transparency of what is used and how. Furthermore, we use data encryption and anonymisation to better protect Olly users.
About Customer Service
14. Are there VAT charges involved?
You will be responsible for the tax obligation in your respective jurisdiction. Duties and taxes differ wildly from country to country, state to state, province to province. Shipments will be made without any prepayment of duties, VAT, taxes, GST and/or HST. This means that there will be nothing additional to pay at the time you finalize your order; however, you will be responsible for taxes, duties and customs fees levied by the customs office in your country. This will likely mean your shipment will be held by customs until duties and taxes are paid.
15. What is your refund policy?
Refunds are processed on a case-by-case basis; at some point we will need to lock refunds in order to go into production & shipment. We will not be able to refund orders once they've been shipped.
16. How will I know when my order ships & can I track my package online?
As soon as our warehouse ships your order, we will send you an email notifying you that your package is en route. In this email we will include a tracking number from the logistics service provider.
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Emotional Character Engine
Vision-enhanced Natural Voice Interaction
Multimodal User-recognition
Action/activity Recognition & Forecasting
Scene Understanding & Vision-augmented Beam-forming
Expressive Visual Interaction System
