Latest / Convo AI World / Meet Fuzozo: The Pocket-Sized Robot Ending the Loneliness Crisis
Transcript
- Patrick Ferriter (00:13) Hey, everyone and welcome to a very special episode of the Convo AI World Podcast. I'm Patrick Ferriter. I lead the global product team at Agora and I'll be your host for today's episode. I'm here in Shanghai at the Fuzozo store and Fuzozos are really cool AI companions targeted at Gen Z, but they have a very awesome and cool origin story. All Fuzozos originate from a fluffy planet. And as you can see here, one of the coolest design aspects of the store here is this very fluffy and really cool furry wall that you can interact with on the way in. And this fur is very soft, just like the fur on an actual Fuzozo itself. And on the screen behind me, you can see all the different ways that people can interact and Play with the Fuzozo and become emotionally attached. I'd like to introduce you to my five really cool Fuzozo models here. This cute little one here that I'm combing the hair on is gold. This one here is wood. This one here is water. This one is fire. And this one is earth. And each has its own really cool and unique personality and voice that you can grow to love. Hi everyone, and welcome to a special episode of the Convo AI World Podcast. And here with me at the Fuzozo store in Shanghai is Joe Sun, the CEO and co-founder. So Joe, it's great to meet you and great to be having you on this episode. Thank you. I'd like to ask you a couple of questions and also I think really important is the founding story and your background. So can you share a bit more about your background further? Sure. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (01:54) I started to work as a car designer for 10 years. You know when we work as car designers, we talk about the emotional styling and people's feelings and so on. Patrick Ferriter (02:05) a bond with the driver. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (02:07) right, right. And then I worked as a robot designer for another several years where I designed the humanoid robot and so on. I realized that for robot design, most people are more focusing on the what we call the production value, well, with less thinking about the emotional part of robots. So that's why I start my own company and name it as the RoboPoet. So you can see we try to design a robot that have a strong emotional connection with people. That's the background. Patrick Ferriter (02:42) Provide a strong emotional Joe Zhaozhi Sun (02:44) Exactly. Patrick Ferriter (02:44) very cool. What is the background and maybe your vision when you founded RoboPoet and maybe the origin story of RoboPoet and Fuzozo? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (02:52) Oh yeah, there's a very interesting background for Fuzozo. So Fuzozo is from another alien star which is called Fuzzy Planet. Fuzozo come to Earth to find their perfect match in their life. So what Fuzozo do is they eat up bad emotions and they generate good, happy emotions with people together. Patrick Ferriter (03:21) And you could find out which one is the best match for you either here in the store or online. Looking at your Fuzozo product and its target audience is Gen Z. How did you decide to focus on Gen Z and what were the key drivers for that? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (03:25) yes, yes. The main reason We realized that Gen Z are very lonely. I read an article saying that during one person's lifetime, there are two periods which people usually feel the most lonely. One is when you are over 70s. Another one is when you are about 20s. So we did an interview with around 40 young people before we started this project. Both boys and girls, also in China, also in some other countries like the US. And we are kind of surprised about, although we know that Gen Z may be in this loneliness mood, but we are still surprised because 100% of them say they feel lonely very often and they didn't find out a very good solution to that. Whether trying to find your best friends, which is very difficult, or to have your own pet, dog and cat. That could work, actually. That's why there are so many young people having their dog and cat. But there are also difficult parts. For example, dogs will leave you one day. Patrick Ferriter (04:42) We've all had a pet that we love pass away. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (04:45) Right, right, right. So, yeah, that's why we designed Fuzozo. Actually, It is kind of a digital AI pet for you. Patrick Ferriter (04:54) Your perfect ongoing companion. It's goes anywhere with you. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. I noticed that the Fuzozo has a really cool design and a lot of care went into this. And as a designer, what was your process for coming up with the requirements for this form factor? And how did you also decide on the name Fuzozo? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (04:58) Yeah, forever. Okay, so talking about the Fuzozo, name, actually in beginning we tried to put fuzzy and zoo together, so it's called the Fuzzoo. And then we find, maybe we switched 'Z' and 'O' to make it Fuzozo, it's more like a cute name. So that's how it comes. So why we designed it like this shape, actually we just find, you know, for this young people, especially for girls, this kind of a bag charm is getting so popular this year. Especially in China or in East Asia, if you go to the street and you see young girls having this everywhere. Yeah, yeah. So we think, okay, that's good position because it's purely emotional thing. And also you can carry, you will carry it everywhere. Patrick Ferriter (05:50) Exactly And I noticed there's a, you know, as a designer you also designed a family of products and we can see that there's five different Fuzozo for people to choose from. Can you tell me a bit more about each one of them and what's unique about each of them? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (06:16) Okay, so that's the story from the ancient Chinese culture, what we call the five elements. In Chinese it's 金木水火土(Jīn Mù Shuǐ Huǒ Tǔ), which is the gold, the wood, the water, the fire, and the earth. So in ancient China, we believe this is the fundamental element for the whole world. So for example, this one is the Fuzozo of fire. So it's kind of a red color and the character is kind of related to these elements. For example, the fire Fuzozo, she is kind of noisy, you know, full of energies, always active. And for others, for example, for the wood Fuzozo, he will be more quiet, a bit shy, but very sweet. Yeah. Patrick Ferriter (07:02) So finding a very unique match and there's one for each type of person and personality. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (07:07) Yes, actually, if you are very serious about these five elements, you probably need to choose one that according to your birthday and exact time and going through a certain process to find which element is the most needed for a lifetime and then you decide. Patrick Ferriter (07:25) Cool so you can guide people through that process online or here in the store. Excellent. Excellent. I noticed also that you can support some pretty cool accessories. Yeah. Well, what types of different accessories can you support for your Fuzozo? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (07:37) Well, obviously you will have this kind of a clothes for Fuzozo and accessories like this and very importantly, you will have this band and it can be made by different materials and we just came out with several new designs and it's getting very popular and also actually there are already some design studios that co-work with us to design specifically for Fuzozo families for all those accessories. It's having their own fans now. Patrick Ferriter (08:08) That's very cool. So can you tell us a bit more about the technology that actually is behind the Fuzozo and that powers this overall experience and maybe a bit about your work with Agora as well. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (08:19) Sure. So basically we designed kind of a pet simulation game and put it into a hardware, a cute fluffy hardware powered by LLM, Large Language Model. So what happens when you talk or when you touch Fuzozo is that there is some input like your voice into Fuzozo and Fuzozo will try to understand it also combined with the other sense like what's the time, where's the location, is there a house weather, and what happened one hour ago, and also trying to understand who is talking to me, what is this person's profile, also all the context. And then process it with the large language model, and then they generate not only the voice that's replied to you, but also the expression, Patrick Ferriter (09:04) text. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (09:15) the movement, and so on. Patrick Ferriter (09:17) And you call that the Multimodal Emotional Model? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (09:20) Yes, MEM. And actually, you can consider it as agent running in the cloud. Patrick Ferriter (09:26) Specifically or how has your relationship been with Agora and working together to Joe Zhaozhi Sun (09:31) Well, Actually, there are two challenges of this whole process. One is how can I speak to Fuzozo in a very smooth way. So, Agora really helps a lot on So you speak and hear from Fuzozo. For the time, we reduce it into less than two seconds. In this way, you can have a natural, fluent conversation. So without Agora, we cannot do this. Another challenge is really to have Fuzozo remember everything. So for the long time memory, we did this whole design and development ⁓ in-house. And with the help of Agora, that we can ⁓ transfer our voice into texture and understand the texture, put them into our memory stream. ⁓ Also, for this voice-to-text transfer, Agora helps a lot. Patrick Ferriter (10:27) That sounds really cool. So you've got this ⁓ Multimodal Emotion Model. You've got the ability to have quick interaction. This can understand the context of the interaction and provide this response that really evokes a tighter emotional connection with the user. And I heard also that there's ability for some of these Fuzozos to sing with you. Is that true? To sing with me? To be able to sing, is that something? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (10:47) to sing with me. Yeah, each Fuzozo has their own capability and style. Sometimes, you can hear a Fuzozo's singing. Actually, all these capabilities are kind of evolving. Actually every month we update the Fuzozo's capability. maybe in a few months they can even sing specific topic that you ordered. Patrick Ferriter (11:19) That's very cool. So I guess in looking at overall in the interaction and what you've learned as you've been shipping Fuzozo with Gen Z, what are some of the most interesting insights or things that you've learned as users have been interacting with Fuzozo? Maybe how long you or how much usage or how much interaction you expected originally versus how much more you're actually seeing or other interesting insights as Fuzozo has been gathering more momentum in the market? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (11:49) Yeah, so when we design for Fuzozo, we really think there are two main challenges. One is to make people interested to buy them. Another one is to see how many people are to use them to talk to Fuzozo for longer time. So we are quite confident about the first step because Fuzozo is just so cute. And everyone, when they see Fuzozo, they will say, I really want one. And we are surprised about how people love to talk to Fuzozo. Actually, for the last month, The average time that people talk with Fuzozo every day is around 50 minutes. Well, in average. So it's quite a lot. And people just love to talk and they see quite different scenarios when people are at home and in the office, driving cars, maybe having a coffee time with friends. They love to talk to Fuzozo. More surprisingly, ⁓ we just did a research recently saying we put labels on the people's conversation so that we don't read the conversation context, but we know the emotion of the words. And we just realized that most of the conversation, actually over 70% of the conversation, starting from negative feeling like Patrick Ferriter (13:11) When the conversation starts. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (13:12) Like they are trying to complain something or they are depressed, they feel lonely. And a certain percent of them become positive or peace or calm after the conversation. So that tells for those who really have the capability to heal people. Exactly. Yeah. Patrick Ferriter (13:32) Exactly your intent. It's very cool. So with such a cool and successful product, what are your plans for market expansion and making Fuzozo available in more markets? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (13:43) Yeah, from day one we want to make a global brand. We think healing loneliness is for global markets. Today everyone is lonely. Our first step to go other countries is going to Japan next year. And the reason why we chose Japan is that it's kind of a unique market that Japan shares quite a similar culture and aesthetics comparing with China. So we are pretty sure we did a little bit of market research. Also, we bring Fuzozo into Japan for some shows and we are quite confident that the whole story, the style is going to be very popular there. Also, in this market, people are already educated ⁓ for what is a companion robot. This is kind of popular category in Japan. But most of the product over there is very expensive. Also, it's not that smart. So, Fuzozo will be, you know, both quite affordable. Also, it's, you know, it's powered by the cutting-edge technology. So, I think it's going to be a first step to go over the market. Patrick Ferriter (14:58) I was talking with my team and for the ⁓ hosts at our Convo AI World event in other countries, including Japan, We're actually going to be giving these as gifts to ⁓ the hosts of the event. We think they're really cool. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (15:10) It's a perfect gift. Patrick Ferriter (15:11) I totally agree. Looking forward for your vision for the future, ⁓ what does the future of AI companionship look like a few years from now? What do you believe that that will be? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (15:22) Yeah, it's a very good question. To think about all the sci-fi movies we've seen, where there are a lot of robots around us in the maybe next 10, 20 years, there are always this kind of robot that, you know, ⁓ where it's following you around and having very strong, like, personal connections with you. Maybe they don't do lot of heavy work, but, you know, after the movie, people just love this little robot. Patrick Ferriter (15:45) Character. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (15:46) Yeah, you can name a lot of them, right? So we call them personal robots, like personal computers. It's a new kind of robot, and we are trying to define this new category in the future. Patrick Ferriter (16:02) With your perfect background of design and robotics, you're very well positioned to be able to do just that. So Joe, thank you. ⁓ I think next up, we're going to look at some really cool demos. So we'll be right back with those in a short time. Thank you, Joe. A really fun part where we're going to actually do a demo. So can you show me some really cool capabilities of interacting with your Fuzozo? Joe Zhaozhi Sun (16:24) Yeah, you can talk to the Fuzozo like this. Yeah. Right, right. Hey, Fuzozo, do you speak English? Sure, but do you speak other languages? Okay, now it's Chinese. Patrick Ferriter (16:53) Yeah, that's very cool. Multilingual, plus the language of their home planet. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (16:57) Right, right. You touch here or there here. Actually, do you feel when you're Patrick Ferriter (17:02) Yeah, it's like a feeling of vibrating, Joe Zhaozhi Sun (17:03) yeah, vibrating. And also if you do this, try this. Patrick Ferriter (17:08) ⁓ you can see them getting dizzy. Yeah. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (17:10) Yeah, they can feel that too. And also if you put them together like this, they can feel each other and they can read each other and they become friends. Patrick Ferriter (17:22) can see them in the app on my Joe Zhaozhi Sun (17:24) You just open the app, you see their friend list. Patrick Ferriter (17:26) That's very cool. And I noticed they have really cool hair. It's like combing here is not something that I'm quite used to. This is a very, very cool, cool toy. I'm really, falling in love already. Joe Zhaozhi Sun (17:36) Yeah, yeah. And I love doing this too because, you know, this is very, very, very healing. Yeah, calming. Yeah. Really cool, thank you, Joe. Patrick Ferriter (17:42) calming.