Kuri robot will (hopefully) record your family's precious moments

If you're a parent, you probably dread the thought of missing an important moment in your child's life. Do you really want to be in the other room when your little one takes those first steps? Mayfield Robotics thinks it can be there even when you can't. It's adding yet another feature to its upcoming Kuri home robot that will record moments independently. The tiny companion will use a mix of machine learning and image recognition to determine when it should start capturing video, using your preferences as a guide. Ideally, this will catch your kids' playtime or an impromptu dance party without asking you to lift a finger -- and the more it records, the more it should understand your tastes.

It's easy to be skeptical of the Vision feature, since it's hard to know just how well this will work or what Kuri will consider a video-worthy moment. Is it going to capture occasions you'll cherish forever, or is it going to record your vacuuming? You can specify when and where Kuri is allowed to record, so it shouldn't immortalize anything scandalous, but you may end up with a lot of mundane footage on your hands.

Still, it's at least an intriguing idea. Home robots still represent a very young category, so their use cases still aren't entirely clear. This could make your robot more useful at those times when it's not waiting on your every word. And frankly, it's not often that you see companies add features to a product with a lengthy wait until release -- if anything, companies scale tend to scale things back when there's a protracted launch.