Moxie

What it's for

The Moxie was an emotional companion for children that the US company Embodied sold for USD 799; it talked to the child, answering with voice and facial expressions. There was one use, but a deep one: supporting a child's social and emotional development through conversation. The robot had a camera, a microphone and touch sensors, and its personality relied on a cloud integration with a language model. And that is the crux of the whole story. When the company ceased operations in November 2024 and shut its servers down permanently on January 30, 2025, most Moxie units became useless, with no refunds. A volunteer project, OpenMoxie, later offered a local replacement server, but only for devices updated before the shutdown. That is why Moxie serves no practical purpose today; it is a case everyone should know before buying a cloud-dependent companion robot. It is a lesson for whole categories, “Educational robots” and home robots: the question "what happens when the manufacturer disappears?" matters as much as the question about price. See also “Data Security: Robots with Cameras and the GDPR”, because a robot with a camera in a child's room is a topic for parents, not just technicians.

Who it's for

Worth considering for: parents, journalists and analysts who want to understand the risks of cloud-based companion robots. Teachers and schools weighing the purchase of devices that depend on the manufacturer's server. Researchers interested in the OpenMoxie project and ways to rescue hardware after a company fails.

Who it is not for: anyone who wants to buy the robot, since Moxie is discontinued and not on sale in Poland or anywhere else. Anyone who owns a unit without an earlier local firmware update; such devices are reportedly unusable. Institutions looking for hardware with guaranteed continuity of support: this example shows how risky it is to depend on an external cloud.

Deployments

The robot was not offered in Poland and has no Polish distributor. Worldwide: there are no published figures for units sold or institutional deployments, so we do not give any. What is confirmed is the ending: the server shutdown in January 2025 and the rescue attempt in the form of the OpenMoxie project. In Polish schools, solutions independent of the cloud work better; see “Educational Robots for Schools and Universities” and schools.

Alternatives should be chosen with independence from the cloud in mind. The most technical is the SO-101 from Hugging Face, an open six-axis arm made of printed parts, from about USD 230 (about PLN 892 (≈ EUR 205)), which teaches real robotics instead of delivering a ready-made "personality".

For children who want to program, a better lead is the NAO, a long-serving educational robot (58 cm, 25 DOF), sold in roughly 20,000 units and available in Poland through deltarobots.com, although the manufacturer's future is uncertain after Aldebaran's insolvency. A third lead is the Miko 3, an Indian robot for children sold only in the Indian market and built on a similar cloud model, so it does not solve the dependency problem.

Moxie was unveiled in January 2020 and went on sale in June 2020. Embodied of Pasadena, founded in 2016, ceased operations in November 2024 after a funding round collapsed. The final date is January 30, 2025, when all cloud servers were shut down. The product's short history thus ends less than five years after it went on sale. For the broader context of risk in new robot categories, see “Humanoid Robot Market Forecasts”.