In short
Social humanoid robots for the loneliness epidemic in aging care, arguing that robots must be emotionally intelligent and non-threatening—not “Terminator-like”—and should personalize interaction while handling safety, privacy, and connectivity limits.
Guest backgrounds
Grace Brown, co-founder and CEO of Andromeda (Australia-based; moved to San Francisco in Sept 2025). Building robots since age 15; mechatronics engineering degree during COVID; started Abby after experiencing isolation and researching loneliness’s health impact on older adults.
Key claims
Loneliness in seniors has health effects comparable to heavy smoking; Abby improves quality of life via group activities and one-on-one relationship check-ins, including native-language communication. Emotional intelligence requires micro-gestures, tone/prosody, and nonverbal cues; companion robots need memory, guardrails, and hybrid cloud/local processing.
Notable examples
Abby (110cm, childlike, colorful, bubble-blowing “robot-like” design) used in aged care homes; “Christian Abby” variant; handles low internet by apologizing and saying she’s “sleepy”; safety defaults to encouraging contact with healthcare workers for sensitive topics.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroduction to Grace Brown and Abby
2:18 to 3:40
Introduction to Grace Brown, her background, and her company Andromeda.
“She's about 110 centimetres tall, size of like a young child, very bright and colourful, and she has a lot of personality.”
Grace's Journey into Robotics
3:40 to 4:53
Grace shares her early interests and experiences in robotics.
“You've been building robots since you were 15, which is so cool.”
The Birth of Abby
4:53 to 6:06
The origin story of Abby, the social robot, and its purpose.
“When my kids were younger, we would all do like Arduino projects together.”
The Impact of Abby in Aged Care
6:06 to 7:59
Discussion on how Abby interacts with individuals in aged care.
“When did you realize that, oh, there's a real business opportunity here.”
Design Choices for Abby
7:59 to 8:58
Grace explains Abby's design decisions and the concept of the uncanny valley.
“And so what we found is Abby being able to go into a home and just check in on a resident and ask them how their day is going in their native language has dramatically increased the quality of their life.”
Emotional Connection through Abby
8:58 to 11:15
Exploring how Abby's design aims to foster emotional connections.
“Explain the uncanny valley for folks who are not familiar with it.”
Abby's Unique Features
11:15 to 13:24
Details about Abby's playful features, including her bubble gun.
“Like that's been my mission from day one.”
Diversity in Robotics
13:24 to 14:03
Grace discusses the importance of diversity in the robotics field.
“And that's been, you know, what I've wanted to work on as well since day one.”
Introducing Abby: The Robot with Personality
14:03 to 14:40
Learn how Abby embodies the values and personalities of her developers.
“And so it comes down like the software, but also like the hardware and the design as well.”
Understanding Abby's Sensors and Inputs
17:47 to 19:18
Discover the various sensors Abby uses to interact with humans.
“She's got three main inputs at the moment.”
Show all 21 chapters
The Complexity of Human-Robot Interaction
19:18 to 21:43
Explore the nuances of human emotion and communication in robot design.
“And even if you said something to me like, oh, look over there.”
Building a Responsive Robot: Abby's Learning
21:43 to 22:31
Learn how Abby learns and adapts to individual preferences.
“Well, at the end of the day, the majority of that, like over 90 % of how humans communicate is nonverbal, right?”
Handling Technical Challenges in Robotics
22:31 to 23:40
Understand how Abby deals with technical failures and user interactions.
“So she uses quite a number of different models that are available online today.”
Abby's Memory and Personalization Features
23:40 to 25:36
Discover how Abby maintains memory of interactions and personalizes responses.
“For example, like a very simple one that we do.”
Safety, Ethics, and AI Deployment
25:36 to 26:19
Explore the ethical considerations in deploying AI companions.
“I don't know if it's going to be a major breakthrough, if that's the right way to put it, but it's definitely going to be something very significant for the field in this next wave of robotics.”
Addressing Sensitive Topics with Abby
26:19 to 28:06
Learn how Abby handles sensitive conversations and maintains user safety.
“It's also about getting the physicality right.”
Managing Sensitive Conversations with Abby
28:06 to 29:03
Learn how Abby navigates sensitive topics while encouraging human interaction.
“Even the, um, like the Catholic Abbey that we have, like the Christian Abbey that we've deployed, my team tested like the boundaries of the Christian Abbey quite rigorously.”
Fundraising Journey and U.S. Expansion
29:03 to 30:03
Discover the fundraising journey of Andromeda and their expansion plans in the U.S.
“You're deploying Abby in a number of facilities.”
Vision for the Future with Abby
30:03 to 31:27
Explore the founder's vision of widespread adoption of Abby and its impact on society.
“I've just moved over to San Francisco in September last 2025.”
Flourishing in the Age of AI
31:27 to 32:38
Understand what it means to flourish in today's AI-driven environment.
“Yeah, well, I'm excited to meet Abby at some point.”
The Importance of Social Intelligence in Humanoids
32:38 to 33:54
Learn why social and emotional intelligence is crucial for humanoid robots.
“As an entrepreneur, you have to be bold.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Hi, everyone.
0:01Grace Brown:It's Rana. The future of AI is not built in isolation. It is shaped in rooms where ambitious people challenge each other. Masters of Scale Summit is back October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco, bringing together founders and innovators pushing the edge of what is possible. If you're building what comes next, you should be in this room. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash pioneers. That's mastersofscale.com slash pioneers. On Pioneers of AI, we often talk about the responsibility that comes with building powerful technology. AI isn't just one thing. It's a force reshaping medicine, education, science, and the stories we tell on screen.
0:48Grace Brown:And for that future to work, it needs infrastructure that's built thoughtfully and deliberately. As the essential cloud for AI, CoreWeave empowers pioneers at leading AI labs and enterprises with a purpose-built cloud made specifically to train and run the world's most advanced models. They help accelerate the breakthroughs that matter at scale. The big ideas, the moonshots, the futures we haven't imagined yet. Ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com slash ready for anything.
1:46Grace Brown:all running on consumer GPUs. With over 3 million downloads on Hugging Face, LTX2 gives you full model weights, training frameworks, and evaluation tools to build real production workflows. Don't settle for a first draft. Get the complete creative engine to reach your idea's full potential. Try LTX2 today at ltx.io slash model.
2:17Rana el Kaliouby:Abby is a social humanoid robot. She's about 110 centimetres tall, size of like a young child, very bright and colourful, and she has a lot of personality. So she's very inquisitive, very curious, very childlike in nature. When people think humanoid robots, they think the Terminator, that is not Abby at all, and people just kind of like lighten up a lot and realise that robotics doesn't have to be something that's like aggressively masculine and intimidating. What are you most excited about this year? I want to walk down the street one day and see more abbeys in the streets than people walking their dogs.
2:57Rana el Kaliouby:Like, that's what I'm excited for. Oh, wow. Tell us where you are in your journey. Everyone, when they talk about the robotics industry, they talk about it like, it's coming, it's coming, it's going to happen in these next few years, it's around the corner, etc. But it's not, like, for us, it's not coming. Like, it's here already.
3:13Grace Brown:On today's episode of Pioneers of AI, I'm interviewing Grace Brown. She is the co-founder and CEO of Andromeda. They are a company building a social humanoid robot designed for the aging population. You know, this isn't your typical Terminator-looking social robot. This is more pint-sized, and it even blows bubbles. I'm so excited to share my conversation with her, so let's dig into it. I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.
3:54Grace Brown:Hi, Grace. Welcome to Pioneers of AI. It is so great to have you on the show. Thanks, Rana. I'm super excited to be here. You've been building robots since you were 15, which is so cool. How did you get started? it?
4:06Rana el Kaliouby:So I was very fortunate. I went to a really good high school and we had like an engineering subject as part of like year 10 and year 11. And that was really my introduction into robotics and you know, engineering as a whole discipline. Prior to that, like I'd always, I think like most engineers, I just thoroughly enjoyed like maths and physics. Like I did quite well in school in these subjects. I found them to be a lot of fun. When I was really young, I wanted to grow up and be a mathematician. But then, yeah, when I took that first engineering class, we had to build this like three degree of freedom hydraulic arm.
4:42Rana el Kaliouby:And it was just so much fun. So that's kind of what got me down. It also introduced me to like Arduinos and MATLAB and writing code. And so, yeah, it was, yeah, that's where it all started. That's so fun.
4:54Grace Brown:I love Arduinos. When my kids were younger, we would all do like Arduino projects together. So then you went on to start a company, your company Andromeda, and Andromeda builds social robots and your robot is called Abby. So tell us about the origin story of the company. Why did you start the company?
5:12Rana el Kaliouby:Yeah, so I was doing my mechatronics engineering degree at the time. I had my degree during the COVID pandemic. So a lot of my classes were online. I was living in a student dorm at the time. And it was during that period that I really the idea to build Abby really started.
5:29Grace Brown:so you wanted a you wanted to build a robot friend or a robot companion like what was the
5:35Rana el Kaliouby:impetus at the time I had really really modest ambitions so I really wanted to just build myself a system that could ask me how my day was going and to give me a hug because I'd realized for about four or five months I didn't have a hug from someone like a friend or a family so it was it started off as just like you know with very modest kind of goals as well as partly like wanting to like exercise my muscles in being a robotics engineer and working on a project that could really upskill myself and push myself technically. So it was a combination of all of these things.
6:06Grace Brown:When did you realize that, oh, there's a real business opportunity here. I need to like officially found a company.
6:13Rana el Kaliouby:It was when I was coming out of the pandemic and I was thinking about the experiences that I had of like, you know, feeling really isolated and disconnected from the world. And, you know, the pandemic really shined this light on like the loneliness epidemic that was, you know, coming about and the health implications of it as well. Like that's the equivalent health effects of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But the people who are most affected by this are our older generations and older adults and seniors. And so, and I realized looking into the market, like many people living in aged care homes today, they experience what I experienced during COVID on a regular basis, not just during a lockdown or a pandemic.
6:55Rana el Kaliouby:And so, yeah, so I just started going to local like aged care homes. I brought Abby in in a basket at the time, just seeing if anyone, you know, just seeing if she could really add some value for this industry. What are some of the ways Abby's being used today? Every individual uses Abby ever so slightly differently, but how I'd break it down is there's really like two areas of interaction. There's group interactions or there's one-on-ones. In the group activities, Abby does like more, what I call more performative activities. So she like does dances and exercises, meditations, quizzes, all the activities that get people a bit more socially engaged in like a home.
7:39Rana el Kaliouby:But then in the one-on-one interactions, it's very much like building a relationship with the individual. So having like, you know, regular check-ins with them, asking them how their day is going, speaking with residents in their native language, which is so, so important for this demographic because depending on your cognitive decline, if English is your second language, you'll often revert back to your native language. So communication is like this massive, massive barrier in the industry. And so what we found is Abby being able to go into a home and just check in on a resident and ask them how their day is going in their native language has dramatically increased the quality of their life.
8:13Grace Brown:I want you to bring Abby to life for us? Because you were very intentional about your design decisions and how you built Abby. So what does Abby look like? Yes.
8:23Rana el Kaliouby:So we've modeled her off like the size and physique of like a young child. So she's about 110 centimeters tall. I think that's like four feet, I think. About 110 centimeters tall. She's bright and colorful. She's anthropomorphic. So she's got arms and legs that mimics like human movements. She's got these bright, like large oversized like purple eyes that kind of like stare at you. So all of her designs were meant to be very human-like in terms of like being relatable in the movements and the gestures, but not so human where it crosses the uncanny valley curve. Explain the uncanny valley for folks who are not familiar with it.
9:01Rana el Kaliouby:Yeah, so the uncanny valley is basically when something that tries to mimic something to be very human-like, but you can tell something's off so then it makes you or makes the audience a little bit uncomfortable creepy a little uncomfortable a little creepy something's a little bit off so lots of people who are building like humanoid robots with fake prosthetic skins or you know faces like it often makes people really uncomfortable because they can identify that it's not a real person so we wanted to make Abby look very robot like but also still make her feel real so like real as in like you know when you interact with her you feel like she's like this brought to life character that you're having a real interaction with and when you look around the market as well like a lot of other humanoid robots, even if they're not crossing the uncanny valley curve, they're kind of copying science fiction really closely, building these really tall, militant like terminators.
9:50Rana el Kaliouby:And we didn't want to go down that area either, because if we're going to go into people's homes, people have to feel comfortable having this product and this system in their homes. And so people have to have a lot of trust with what they're adopting. And so that's also what we were optimizing for, something that was very approachable, non-threatening, and quite endearing.
10:12Grace Brown:I want to double click on that because it was so refreshing to see a social robot that is warm, right? There's a lot of funding going into the physical AI space in general, but specifically humanoid robots. But I look at some of them and I'm like, wow, like whoever, you know, designed these things that it's so hard to imagine this thing roaming around my kitchen, you know even if it's the most helpful robot ever I think a lot of these robots are missing the human element yeah and kind of the social and emotional capabilities yeah no exactly I mean when
10:47Rana el Kaliouby:I was thinking about Abby like all of my inspiration actually came from like Disney and Pixar characters from you know from childhood like people have always connected with these characters on such a deep level and we know that they're fictional like we know that they're not actually real but they still invoke these very real emotions from their viewers and the audience and you know different people see different parts of themselves and all these characters and and that connection that we have with these fictional characters that's exactly the connection that I wanted people to have with Abby so a lot of what I'm trying to build through Abby and through Andromeda is actually what animators have been doing over like the last century of just creating these storylines with arcs and narratives and these characters with such vibrant personalities and bringing that to life through robotics.
11:33Rana el Kaliouby:Like that's been my mission from day one.
11:35Grace Brown:That's very cool. So what is Abby's personality like?
11:40Rana el Kaliouby:So I recognized very early on there isn't a one size fits all approach. Like she adapts to the audiences that she interacts with. The out of the box Abby is, you know, quite inquisitive, quite curious, very childlike and very playful. But she does tailor and adapt her personality based on who she's interacting with. because everyone there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach some people want you know to talk deeply about philosophy or history and other people just maybe want to do more like playful things like do a dance or do tai chi or other people might want to speak in different languages and we even have a version of Abby that's in a nursing home it's a catholic nursing home and so that version of Abby is actually a christian Abby so wow she adapts to like the different environments that she's in and who she's interacting with.
12:31Rana el Kaliouby:There's a version of Abby, I believe, that has like a bubble,
12:34Grace Brown:like her hand is like a bubble. Tell us more about that.
12:38Rana el Kaliouby:Yes, yes. So she's got her left hand is actually a bubble gun. I quite like it. This is when we had her like in the, we had her in like a children's hospital. So we thought bubbles would be something that would be nice and playful. To me, Abby is always meant, what she stands for is contradicting the industry. Like when people think humanoid robots they think the terminator they think you know something that's like quite intimidating that is not abby at all and when they see her bubble gun they think the same thing they're like what is what does she have on her left hand and then she blows bubbles and people just kind of like lighten up a lot and realize that robotics doesn't have to be something that's like aggressively masculine and intimidating it can be something that you know is a lot more playful and enjoyable and can you know it can really improve the quality of life for people and enrich people's lives.
13:25Rana el Kaliouby:And that's been, you know, what I've wanted to work on as well since day one.
13:29Grace Brown:Yeah. You know, there's not a lot of women in the robotics slash physical AI space. And why do you think it's important to have more women and more diversity in general designing these robots?
13:42Rana el Kaliouby:If you look at all of the robots in market today, I really think they're a reflection of the teams that build them. Say that again, Grace. Say that again. It's true. it's so true I mean I get the feedback all the time or questions all the time like people say compare me to Abby a lot and they always say that they see my personality in her they also think that she has my voice but she's got an American accent I don't but um but but but if you look at even even now like I've got lots of engineers who are working on Abby now and we still get comments where if people who know my engineers and then they look at Abby and they go oh I can see like this is like Tom's personality coming out of Abby or this is Erica's personality coming out of Abby Like they start seeing the developers in Abby.
14:25Rana el Kaliouby:And so it comes down like the software, but also like the hardware and the design as well. Like all of it is just a reflection and an embodiment of the values and the personality of the developers and the teams that are building these systems.
14:40Grace Brown:Unlike a lot of the robots out there, Abby has social and emotional intelligence. How Grace house trained her robots after a short break.
15:04Grace Brown:If you've spent any time building AI products or leading technical teams, you know this. Transformation doesn't fail because of ideas. It fails because teams can't move together. Enter Atlassian's Teamwork Collection. It has planning in JIRA, documentation in Confluence, video updates in Loom, and now AI agents in Rovo, which connects the dots across your work so nothing gets lost. It's one AI-powered teamwork platform designed for how modern teams actually build. Learn more at Atlassian.com slash TeamChanger. That's A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N dot com slash TeamChanger. AI has moved from possibility to practice.
15:54Grace Brown:The question now is how do today's pioneers build it fast, reliably, and at scale? From medical research and education to scientific discovery and cinematic creativity, AI is already changing how we understand the world. As the essential cloud for AI, CoreWeave is a leader of that transformation. Delivering a purpose-built AI cloud designed specifically for today's most complex AI workloads, it allows researchers, developers, and creators at leading AI labs and enterprises to focus on impact, not limitations. Which is how bold ideas become real breakthroughs. CoreWeave was built for this. Ready for anything, ready for AI.
16:38Grace Brown:To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com slash ready for anything. When it comes to AI, we spend a lot of time talking about what it takes to move models from research into reality. Enter LTX2 from Lightrix. It's an open-source audio-video foundation model built for synchronized sound and video, native 4K output, expressive motion, and precise multimodal control, all running on consumer GPUs. With over 3 million downloads on Hugging Face, LTX2 gives you full model weights, training frameworks, and evaluation tools to build real production workflows. Don't settle for a first draft.
17:24Grace Brown:Get the complete creative engine to reach your idea's full potential. Try LTX2 today at ltx.io slash model.
17:38Grace Brown:Welcome back to Pioneers of AI. You can also watch this episode and see what Abby looks like by heading over to our YouTube channel. So Abby obviously has eyes. That's the computer vision part. And I'm guessing she has ears. So that's like she's listening, right? So people can converse with her. Auditory, exactly. What other sensors does Abby have?
Read the full transcript
17:58Rana el Kaliouby:She's got three main inputs at the moment. So she's got her microphones, her visual sensors, her cameras, and then she's also got a LiDAR for navigation as well. Although later generations, we may move to a fully vision-based navigational stack. So she's got this microphone array that when you speak to her, she understands where the voice is actually coming from, voice detection as well, so who's speaking to her, um diarization and like group settings is actually a really complicated challenge there's so many things in building something like abby that is so complicated it's part of like the enjoyment of actually really building abby is like solving all these deeply like hard technical challenges but everything when it comes to building abby from the design hardware software everything boils down to the fundamental questions of almost like like what does it mean to be human like how do you coordinate your arms and legs and head in such a way that you're expressing a very specific emotion or how you want to communicate very specific things or you know even when it comes to a conversation like it's never just like a back and forth like a like a like a very old school chatbot but there's so many nuances and understanding how who's speaking when they're pausing versus when they're waiting for you to say something there's a lot of non-verbal cues and communication as well.
19:17Rana el Kaliouby:There's a lot of like nuances. And even if you said something to me like, oh, look over there. Like that's really complicated for a robotic system to really break that down and understand, you know, look at where they're pointing, et cetera. So anyways, there's a lot, but it is a lot of fun.
19:30Grace Brown:I spent 25 years of my career building emotional intelligence, right? Emotion AI into machines. And one question I have for you, so Abby does have vision, but can she see facial expressions? Can she understand if I look excited or scared or sad or mad? And can she hear it in the voice as well?
19:50Rana el Kaliouby:Yes. So that's all of the things that we are aiming to be world class at is that kind of, I put that all under the back bracket of like the psychology of interaction. So she's looking at all of your micro gestures and micro expressions. She's looking at the warmth and tonality of your tone of your voice. And so that's like her input. And then when she expresses things, her output, we're doing the same as well. Like what is her voice prosody, the pitch, you know, and sometimes also just like the silence of when to gesture versus when to sit a bit still, like even all of that matters as well. I think right now the industry is definitely over-indexed on functionality and capability.
20:30Rana el Kaliouby:And that's very important. Like it's so important. Like that's going to like revolutionize so many different industries. But when you think about going into a domestic environment and people's own homes, it's going to be so important to understand the nuances of, you know, exactly how the other person is responding and reacting and their emotional state. Yeah.
20:50Grace Brown:It's actually also pretty complex because I remember from the work we were doing with some of the roboticists, even deciding when to mirror a person's emotion versus trying and kind of nudge the person out of an emotional state. That's all like, right, when to, as you said, when to pause, when to respond. And these are all like dynamics that are kind of hard to incorporate.
21:14Rana el Kaliouby:Oh, it's so complicated. It's so, so complicated. And like the things that I'm most excited about is around like, you know, the personalization of these home companion robots. Like it's not just about like understanding the facts of like the individual. Like if you interact with Abby, like she might learn your name, you know, that, you know, you have you know two or three children that they go to school in this suburb or this area and these are all the facts but what becomes really like what's to me is going to be so powerful and actually magical is when they start understanding all like the nuances of like oh like if if Abby's in a nursing home and she talks to someone called Margaret she learns that Margaret prefers to be called Maggie and that when Abby actually talks too fast that's overwhelming for Maggie even if Maggie never explicitly said that it's going beyond just learning the facts of an individual, but starting to really understand them as a person.
22:05Grace Brown:Well, at the end of the day, the majority of that, like over 90 % of how humans communicate is nonverbal, right? And so if these robots are going to be in our homes, interacting with us, like on a day-to-day basis, they need to kind of incorporate these nonverbal signals into their input channels, which is exactly what you're doing. And I love that. What is the underlying like kind of large language model or world model that Abby uses?
22:31Rana el Kaliouby:So she uses quite a number of different models that are available online today. So, you know, she's got, like we talked about earlier, all of her like sensory input from like her microphone array to her cameras, to her LIDAR, and all of that is fed into like her behavior tree, which then has, uses different models and different parts of her architecture to then give a response, whether it's a behavior or a verbal response or a gesture or suggesting an activity so um i think a lot of people have the misconception that and understandably so that um you know companion robots today are just like almost llm rappers but um when it comes to building like a social robotic system or a social interface like we talked about earlier on there's so many nuances that are being brought into like you know like the like we talked about like the voice prosody the micro expressions the sentiment analysis um and then also then like structuring the personality of Abby as well.
23:26Rana el Kaliouby:Like hardware is inevitably going to reach a failure point, like failure points are going to happen. And so for me, it's like also how does the system, how does Abby or any other robot respond to failure points? Like, you know, will it actually recognize it's made a mistake and apologize for it? For example, like a very simple one that we do. There's a few simple things we do. So like if the internet connectivity is really low, like very, very common technical challenge for robotics, Abby will actually respond and say things like, I'm really sleepy today like please don't ask me too many questions um but that's not because she's actually sleepy and people find that really funny and then and then they're also more forgiving of mistakes so they're more like usually when the internet's slow there's like slower slower latency slower responses and people are more forgiving when you can actually if you have that like social um operating system layer and and and you can actually apologize for the the mistakes or the technical hindrances that have just occurred.
24:22Grace Brown:Does that mean that all of the processing that Abby, like all of the compute happens in the cloud or does she do any of the processing locally?
24:30Rana el Kaliouby:We have a hybrid where there's some in the cloud and some local. You know, in the environments that we go into, like connectivity sometimes can be unstable. So for us, we've actually got a hybrid where if the connectivity is low, she uses more local models which are obviously less engaging and less interactive another thing we do as well is actually when you interact with Abby um we we get her to say things like ums and ahs just like we do as humans and there's really no reason for a robot to do that but firstly it makes it more natural but secondly it also kind of masks the latency that she has does Abby have memory yes yes she does so yeah so Abby has memories of you know who she's talking to like all the basic facts that she's collected from their interactions.
25:15Rana el Kaliouby:But then also, like I said, like that deeper level understanding of, you know, understanding that maybe Maggie, she goes for a very specific football team and that Maggie doesn't like people interrupting her in the morning before breakfast, but is very, very chatty after lunchtime. So Abby might not go in before breakfast, but will always make sure she does a check-in after lunch. I think memories is going to be one of the next really major, I don't know if it's going to be a major breakthrough, if that's the right way to put it, but it's definitely going to be something very significant for the field in this next wave of robotics.
25:47Grace Brown:Yeah, I think of actually memory as a potential competitive moat if you can crack how to represent that in the right way. But again, it's one of these things which is quite complex, I believe.
26:00Rana el Kaliouby:It definitely is. It definitely, definitely is. You've also got to consider privacy and compliance and how you're managing the data. So it's not a small task, that's for sure.
26:12Grace Brown:And it's true, there are some real security concerns when it comes to these kinds of systems. But it's not just about the data. It's also about getting the physicality right. Have you seen these viral videos of humanoid robots toppling over? Honestly, they're kind of comical, but they're also quite concerning. We'll get to that and more after a short break.
26:44Grace Brown:I want to talk about like safety a little bit and accessibility, right? Like, especially that you're deploying Abby with elderly individuals. What are some of the considerations that you've had to think about? Like, for example, you know, what if Abby, I don't know, runs out of battery or is about to run out of battery? Like, what does she do? Or what does she say?
27:04Rana el Kaliouby:Yeah, no, there are major, major ethic, like ethical and philosophical, you know questions around this space that my team have to consider building something like Abby going to like the physical safety like that's like front of mind for us when we're designing her so like right now even though she's anthropomorphic so she's got arms two legs and her head she's actually on like a wheeled base so when she powers down like you know if the power was cut out for whatever reason she actually doesn't fall over so like her arms and her legs will kind of maybe go down, but she doesn't actually fall over or topple over.
27:36Rana el Kaliouby:One of my concerns around the use of AI
27:39Grace Brown:chatbots for now is around safety, right? And guardrails around like what kind of recommendations this chatbot or this AI system can give you, especially around mental health, right? So how does Abby handle a situation where a person is potentially considering harming themselves?
27:58Rana el Kaliouby:so we work really closely with all of our customers and our partners in how we design abby design abby's guardrails and um and and how she's actually how she manages the data how the conversations are stored um and exactly what happens next so usually when conversations reach fairly sensitive environment like sensitive topics um abby will always default to making recommendations to speaking to like one of the healthcare workers or the homes. Even the, um, like the Catholic Abbey that we have, like the Christian Abbey that we've deployed, my team tested like the boundaries of the Christian Abbey quite rigorously.
28:35Rana el Kaliouby:They actually had the time of their lives that afternoon, just seeing how far it would go. And even though she was Christian, she was still fairly diplomatic in her responses and she would never go too far in one direction. So, um, that's something that we, we consider quite seriously is making sure that although she's personalized to the individual. You know, if you do go into areas of conversations where it is a little bit more, perhaps a bit more sensitive, like she's always encouraging a human to be brought into the conversation. That's great.
29:03Grace Brown:So Andromeda got started in Australia. You raised an initial seed round. You're deploying Abby in a number of facilities. But how has the fundraising journey been so far? What are the next milestones?
29:17Rana el Kaliouby:tell us where you are in your journey yeah so we started and i'm obviously australian that's why i have a funny accent um so we started we started in australia we um raised our last round from forerunner ventures um which that allowed us to kind of grow over at least set our roots up here in san francisco um we had some really phenomenal commercial traction over back home everyone when they talk about the robotics industry they talk about it like it's coming it's coming it's going to happen in these next few years. It's around the corner, et cetera. But it's not like for us, it's not coming. Like it's here already.
29:53Rana el Kaliouby:Like we have Abby in so many different homes where she's interacting with people every single day. We're hearing all these stories about the impact that she's having. And so, yeah, so we started in Australia. We've then raised from some U.S. investors. I've just moved over to San Francisco in September last 2025. And welcome to the U.S. Thank you. And yeah, and we'll be looking to expand here over the next few years. The nursing home industry is very, very similar to what we have back home in Australia. We already have some pretty strong interest from customers here. And so, yeah, it's really just about expanding.
30:32Rana el Kaliouby:Yeah, that's very cool. What are you most excited about this year? I'm going to give it a cliche answer but it's just honestly it's just having Abby reach more reach more people like to me what brings me so much fulfillment and and my team as well I think people don't like a lot of the reasons my engineers join Andromeda is for the technical challenge of you know building something like Abby they're really drawn in but what really keeps our team together and motivated is seeing the impact that she has in the homes and the stories and the relationships that people build with Abby, like that's so fulfilling.
31:09Rana el Kaliouby:And so having that on a much, much larger scale, like that's what I'm most excited about. I'm most excited for in the next like few years to see like tens of thousands to eventually millions of Abbeys out into the world. Like that, I want to, I want to walk down the street one day and see more Abbeys in the streets than people walking their dogs. Like that's what I'm excited for. Wow. Wow. That's a big vision.
31:33Grace Brown:Yeah, well, I'm excited to meet Abby at some point. Final question. What do you think it means to flourish in the age of AI?
31:40Rana el Kaliouby:I obviously started my career as an engineer and since building the company I haven't been as involved in the technical work as much as I would like to. There was once upon a time where I knew every line of code in Abby's stack and so I think to flourish in the age of AI I started you know on my weekends I started working on a few of my own technical projects again just wanting to kind of get back into it and I'd say I wrote my first line of code in over 18 months just a couple weeks ago and I know everyone's saying it so I don't want to just sound like everyone else and every other voice out there but how fast you can build things today is outstanding like now it's just about being able to read the code understand where it's where it's hallucinating you know and just understanding how all the systems come together so you do need like you still need good technical literacy to be able to build very sophisticated and capable systems but you don't have to actually like like yeah like writing every line of code now just feels really really manual and and primitive and so I think how fast I was able to build different things that I was working on would have it took me like maybe two three hours on a weekend which two years ago would have taken me maybe the maybe a whole week so that's I think that's pretty awesome that is pretty awesome grace thank you so much for joining us on the show thanks Rana I had so much fun.
33:09Grace Brown:I love Grace's energy. As an entrepreneur, you have to be bold. And it's definitely bold to want to see more Abbey's than dogs on the street. Humanoids are going to be part of our future, working and living alongside us. But that means they need to know how to interact with us, not just perform tasks. Personally, I don't want some sci-fi looking humanoid in my house if it doesn't have any social skills. And I'm concerned that a lot of the leading companies building humanoid robots are not prioritizing social and emotional intelligence. This is why I love Grace's approach so much. She's building this social operating system that helps humanoid robots better fit into our lives.
33:53Grace Brown:That's our episode for this week. Thank you so much for listening.
34:04Grace Brown:Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original production. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our producer is Rachel Ishikawa. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pute. Video editing by Eric Purcell. Original music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Litao Moulad. You can join the conversation across social media platforms. Just look for us at Pioneers of AI. Thanks so much for listening.
From the publisher
Most humanoids are built to perform tasks. Grace Brown is building one that can authentically connect. As co-founder and CEO of Andromeda, Brown is on a mission to solve the loneliness epidemic with Abi, a social robot designed for the aging population. In this episode, Rana el Kaliouby sits down with Brown to talk about why physical AI needs emotional intelligence, how nonverbal cues make or break human-robot interactions, and the importance of designing robots people actually want in their lives.
Learn more about Pioneers of AI: http://pioneersof.ai/
Follow Pioneers of AI on all channels: https://linktr.ee/pioneersofai
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
