Thanks to a vibrant investment scene, and major government support, Korea is growing really fast. There’s been a massive startup upswing, but only about 10 percent are currently looking at markets outside Korea.
Circulus, with its Pibo, is one of this 10 percent.
“I think that if everyone could make their own programs in Korea, then our country will be stronger,” CEO Jonggun Park said.
His goal to teach everyone to code became Pibo, an open-source, Raspberry Pi-based, 3D-printed home robot with its own cloud-based system, where you can code it through a block language, use JavaScript or download features that other people have written. Everyone can add their own ideas for programming, share their ideas, and download other peoples’ ideas too.
Pibo plays soothing music, asks about your emotions, and takes notes to relay to other family members. It has personality. The coolest thing about Pibo isn’t the hardware. It’s the AI platform.
Pibo’s platform scrapes Google and the Korean services Naver and Kakao, and mixes in news sources like the New York Times and BBC News, trying to fit queries to web data the way Google Assistant does. The company also plans to integrate the Alexa API and let Pibo use Alexa skills.