# Jibo

> Jibo, Inc. was a Boston robotics company founded in 2012 by Cynthia Breazeal and Jeri Asher. It sold a stationary, expressive home robot for $899 at its 2017 public launch, combining face and voice recognition with greetings, photographs and basic assistant functions. The company closed in 2018; subsequent commercial efforts and MIT research continued separately.

- **Founded:** 2012
- **Headquarters:** Boston, United States
- **Founders:** Cynthia Breazeal (Co-founder and chief scientist; formerly CEO), Jeri Asher (Co-founder and executive vice president)
- **Products:** Jibo home social robot, Jibo SDK and developer tools, NTT Disruption Jibo trials, MIT Jibo community research platform
- **Notable:** Included in TIME’s 25 Best Inventions of 2017., CES 2018 Innovation Awards honoree in robotics., Commercialized a social robotics design rooted in Breazeal’s MIT research.

## Products & services

- **Jibo home social robot** — Stationary tabletop companion with expressive motorized movement, an animated screen, face and voice recognition, greetings, photographs, trivia and basic voice assistance. Public launch price: $899. No household manipulation or mobility.
- **Jibo SDK and developer tools** — Tools for creating robot skills, animations and interactions; historical developer tooling used Atom and Electron. The 2017 launch release promised an SDK in 2018, so earlier development access should not be confused with a complete consumer app marketplace.
- **NTT Disruption Jibo trials** — Successor commercial effort aimed at hospital communication, remote care and welfare; NTT reported paid English-language trials from March 2020.
- **MIT Jibo community research platform** — Separate academic platform used for human-robot interaction research and programming workshops, including ROS/Firebase in 2024 and MCP/LLM materials in 2026.

## Achievements

- Included in TIME’s 25 Best Inventions of 2017.
- CES 2018 Innovation Awards honoree in robotics.
- Commercialized a social robotics design rooted in Breazeal’s MIT research.
- Hardware continued as a platform for academic human-robot interaction research.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — MIT-hosted KACST workshop materials dated July 22 cover Jibo history, ROS, language models, MCP control and live coding; these are research resources, not a consumer relaunch.
- **2024-03** — MIT organized the Jibo Community Social Robot Research Platform @Scale workshop at HRI 2024.
- **2024-01** — Human-robot interaction researcher Christoph Bartneck reported that NTT Disruption closed in 2023, ending that commercial continuation.

## Links

- Website: http://www.jibo.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jibo-inc-
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/jibo
- GitHub: https://github.com/jiborobot
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jiborobot/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/jibo
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-05