I have a short question - how would you react if someone would tell you that it'll be possible to have a real fembot (yes, with arms and legs) in 2025 for about $2000 (yes, two thousands)?
"Ludicrous!" some would say. "Stop abusing mushrooms" would say others. Fair, but...
But jokes aside, I need your help. Recently I built a fembot which is finally good enough for the market (or at least I think so). Here's the proof - https://youtu.be/xKOH8TngKsU
I have enough confidence (or foolishness) in that - so much so, that I actually started a company together with my wife.
Now, what is the goal of this post? The goal is to start a discussion. We would appreciate any ideas, feedback (on the video, website, anything else), feature requests, etc. We want to know how many of you would actually really consider buying something like Synthia for her current price. And if you wouldn't consider such a purchase - we would like to know why?
All of this would help us to start market-fitting the robot. As you know, investors love the words "fit for market". And we certainly do need investors
tl;dr is at the bottom for those who don't want to read about the background and the current state of things
Right now we're a small Norwegian startup, and our goal is as simple as a brick - to build mass-produced, cheap gynoids/androids for everyone. Basically, we're trying to do to humanoid robots what Henry Ford did to automobiles - make'em simple and cheap, and then make a way to produce A LOT of them
Perhaps together we can also make it the first community-driven startup?
I'm an engineer by profession, and I've been building robots since I remember myself
After discovering FembotWiki in 2013 I started taking some inspiration from it as well Over the last 15 years, I've made 4 generations of fembots, where Synthia is the 4th gen. While previous models were not suitable for the market in one way or another, Synthia is a completely different story.Synthia project is quite frankly groundbreaking. I know this word is overused to oblivion, but in this case it has some merits. You all are probably aware of price tags of Realbotix's or DS' robots. In our case, we're slashing that price at least an order of magnitude (or two orders in case of Realbotix). We designed our robot in such a way it can be cheaply mass-manufactured. We're not using any unique or hard to obtain third-party parts, only widely available, affordable ones. This means that even if some of our supply chain nodes would experience any issues, we can simply switch vendors without making any changes to the hardware. We're also avoiding any complex mechanical/electrical structures which would require a lot of man-hours to assemble. Synthia can be (and will be) assembled by fully automatic assembly lines.
Another quite innovative (in comparison to the existing robots) point is our position on security and privacy. We opted for a fully offline solution. Basically, if something is not connected to internet and can't be remotely accessed, it's as secure as it's physically possible. Same goes to privacy - "no internet" means "no anxiety". This is why we opted for a completely offline solution - all data processing is happening inside the robot. Obviously it means that we had to strip the AI models quite severly to make them fit into the limited constraints. But it worked! And now we're working on a more custom-built brain SBC, which will double the performance
Synthia is mostly software-defined fembot. This is the biggest breakthrough for me personally as it's my best SW-defined design to date. What it means is that the hardware is so unified and optimized for scaling, that almost all actual functionality is defined by software. This means we can provide new functionality by a simple software update. Basically, plug a USB drive into your fembot and she'll automatically update herself (this function is already actually implemented and I'm using it all the time during debugging).
Finally, I have to touch the “skin” topic
Right now, there are only 2 options: no skin (bare plastic covers), and spandex-based skin covering. Same goes to the face – it’s only plastic right now, but it will be silicone and support expressions. We would love to work on the fully silicone skin option, but that would require resources we don’t have atm. So a big chunk of that initial investment would actually go into building a silicone pouring facility.If you're truly a fan of the idea of cheap mass-produced domestic fembots, and you're willing to participate in the project in any way (testing the robots, building software or modding hardware, 3d modeling, doing some website-related work, or even simply spreading the word), please don't hesitate to contact me. There's always something to do for anyone who's willing to help
And it goes without saying that all early contributors will be rewarded (and those who wish so, might also be employed) once we secure the initial investment(s).What do you think?
tl;dr for those who skipped the wall of text above:
We would appreciate any ideas, feedback (on the video, website, anything else), feature requests, etc. We want to know how many of you would actually really consider buying something like Synthia for her current price. And if you wouldn't consider such a purchase - we would like to know why?
Let's discuss what would you like (or hate) to see in an actual affordable fembot?
P.S. This all is just a tip of the iceberg. There are so many things which I'd like to discuss, from AI alignment to consciousness simulation, from facial presets to intimate features. Let's start discussing, and then all of that would surface, I'm sure.
P.P.S. This post was not written or even drafted with AI. I actually sat down and typed it. Quite unexpected thing to do these days, isn't it?
but! we'll have a better understanding of what people want and how it aligns with our ability to implement new features.