- Sunday Robotics designed and developed their new robot, Memo, and the platform for training it in stealth over the past two years. No hype events, no prototypes being operated remotely by humans, no promises to change the world. Sunday seems happy to let the result of the work stand for itself: the company’s first tweet was posted just this month! In an age of endless and often fraud-adjacent hype, quiet competence is a refreshing vibe.
- Memo’s form is unique: a friendly, cartoonish-yet-anthropomorphic upper half connected via telescoping rod to a wheeled, rectangular base. Many robotics companies attempt to mimic the human body and in doing so adopt the limitations that come with it. Memo is not bipedal, but in return it has gained the ability to grow and shrink to reach farther than a human could.
- Another side effect of this design is that Memo is never at risk of falling over and hurting someone if it loses power unexpectedly or malfunctions. Sunday calls this feature “passive stability” and, simple enough though it may seem, feels pretty important when considering the practical matter of having a robot moving around your home.
- On the Star Wars/Trek spectrum, Meta falls farther towards the Trek end than many other home robots I’ve seen. That is a very big complement!
- Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Nintendo vs. Sony. Memo could have been plucked right out of a Super Mario game.
- Memo’s physical form is so well crafted that many of the videos of it in action appear to be CGI renders. Sunday assures that they are real, uncut videos, but suspicion comes with the territory these days.
- The best part of the whole thing might just be that you can change Memo’s hat. Visitors to Sunday’s website can even vote for new hat styles (bucket hat has my vote). Because what is the point of owning a robot if you can’t accessorize it?
- Sunday has taken a unique approach to training Memo: human beings wear gloves while performing tasks that restrict their motion to only that of which the robot is capable. Sunday calls these humans “Memory Developers.”
- This training strategy can be contrasted with the approach taken by many of Sunday’s competitors, which is to gather training data via humans operating the robots remotely. But this misses many of the subtleties of how humans actually move. Watching Memo handling delicate stemware makes it clear how the quality of training data translates to real-world performance. There’s an awkwardness in the movement of other home robots which Memo seems to largely avoid.
- The brim of Memo’s hat cleverly houses a downward looking camera for capturing the bot’s field of view. This mirrors the headset mounted camera that memory developers wear in addition to the training gloves.
- Once again we are reminded that the most valuable resource of the AI era, the resource in increasingly short supply, is data generated by the unique experiences of humans. According to Sunday, the going rate for a memory developer is around $60 an hour.
- The idea of “memory development” as a career is straight out of science fiction (looking at you, Blade Runner 2049) and yet, here it is, in 2025, arriving without us ever really noticing. The future can be awfully sneaky.
