In an acknowledgement that cracking the house robotics market is tough, Amazon is bringing its Astro robotic to a decidedly extra company viewers.
The corporate immediately announced Astro for Enterprise, which repurposes Astro as a safety robotic for small- and medium-sized enterprise clients. Astro for Enterprise provides a number of new capabilities to Astro, together with the power to create a number of safety monitoring routes and ship alerts when the robotic hears the sounds of smoke and carbon monoxide alarms or glass breaking.
“[T]raditional security solutions can be too static or expensive for what businesses need. We think Astro for Business can help with that,” Anthony Robson, head of product for Amazon Astro, mentioned in a canned assertion.
Astro for Enterprise isn’t precisely low-cost, although, beginning at $2,349.99 — particularly contemplating getting the total worth out of the service requires subscribing to extra plans.
To avoid wasting video historical past and sync Astro with Ring alarms and movement detectors, Astro for Enterprise clients need to pay $20 monthly for Ring Shield Professional. Astro’s patrolling and alerting options, referred to as Astro Safe, aren’t free of charge — they’re $60 monthly on their very own. Human agent help and monitoring is $99 monthly, and requires subscriptions to Ring Shield Professional and Astro Safe.
Now, Astro for Enterprise — which is simply obtainable within the U.S. at launch — does embrace a four-month trial of Ring Shield Professional and Astro Safe. However the prices will definitely add up.
Priced as excessive as it’s, Astro for Enterprise appears to be an try and extract what worth Amazon can out of Astro, which was conspicuously absent from the corporate’s annual gadgets and companies showcase this yr. Amazon’s VP of client robotics, Ken Washington, not too long ago departed, and Astro stays an invite-only product roughly two years after its unveiling.
“Even Amazon can’t quite figure out what Astro is for,” my colleague Haje wrote in an op-ed final Might. Certainly.
