Roomba – pressnews

[ad_1] Amazon.com Inc. must pledge to fairly rank rival robot vacuum cleaners sold on its online marketplace if it is to secure European Union approval for its $1.4 billion buyout of Roomba maker iRobot Corp., the bloc's interim competition chief Didier Reynders warned. His comments follow last week's move by the European Commission to issue a formal statement of objections cataloging potential reasons to block the deal unless Amazon comes up with an offer to fix them. “The main issue is to be sure to have a fair treatment of all the different actors,” Didier Reynders, the EU's acting commissioner for competition, told reporters after an event in Brussels. Reynders, who's standing in for competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager while she runs for the top job at the European Investm...

[ad_1] A new study from Duke developmental psychologists asked kids just that, as well as how smart and sensitive they thought the smart speaker Alexa was compared to its floor-dwelling cousin Roomba, an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner.Four- to eleven-year-olds judged Alexa to have more human-like thoughts and emotions than Roomba. But despite the perceived difference in intelligence, kids felt neither the Roomba nor the Alexa deserve to be yelled at or harmed. That feeling dwindled as kids advanced towards adolescence, however. The findings appeared online April 10 in the journal Developmental Psychology. The research was inspired in part by lead author Teresa Flanagan, seeing how Hollywood depicts human-robot interactions in shows like HBO's "Westworld.""In Westworld and the movie E...

Tag: Roomba

Amazon Must Promise to Rank iRobot Rivals Fairly, EU Watchdog Warns

Kids judge Alexa more human than Roomba: Study