Skip to main content

Never let your kids go unsupervised again! NannyBot will keep tabs for you

nannybot nanny budgee top for web
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Like a metal Mary Poppins, NannyBot is a robotic childminder that promises to keep an eye on your kids.

Created by U.S. startup Five Elements Robotics, NannyBot’s mission imperative is to follow your kids around and feed audio and video back to a parent’s smartphone, tablet or computer. It even boasts an optional basket accessory to hold children’s toys.

“If you’re a parent and your kids are in another room or outside playing, you want to make sure that you can oversee them,” CEO Wendy Roberts told Digital Trends. “With the NannyBot you can do this by using a robot and embedded camera, which lets you see and hear everything that’s going on with them. It works in one of two ways: Either you remotely control NannyBot using your phone, or there’s a sensor your child can wear which will make the robot follow them wherever they go. It’s a big step up from stationary nursery monitors because it can drive around. After all, kids are mobile.”

Building on the company’s existing Budgee robot personal assistant technology (read: remote-control shopping basket), NannyBot is around three feet tall and features a rechargeable battery that lasts for eight hours. It can be used indoors and outdoors during good weather and offers a variety of different language options and customizable messages that it can say to your children.

But will moms and dads be ready to have their kids monitored by a robot? “That’s an excellent question,” Roberts said. “My answer is that the robots are coming. They just are. What’s happened now is that the technology has matured and the pricing of the components has come down to the point where it’s affordable. We’re at a special time in history. I think in five years you’re going to see nanny robots in 75 percent of homes.”

NannyBot is currently available for pre-order at $1,699. It will be making an appearance as one of three Five Elements robots being shown at CES in January.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Vivint’s Car Guard keeps tabs on your vehicle when you’re not in it
vivint car guard setup

Your car is part of your home. Whether it's parked in your garage, the street, or the driveway, or simply getting you from place to place, it's something that you count on almost as often as the roof over your head. Now, Vivint wants to protect it like it's part of your home, too. The security company is introducing the new Vivint Car Guard, a first-of-its-kind service that allows users to keep tabs on their vehicle when they aren't behind the wheel.

Integrated directly into the existing Vivint Smart Home app, Car Guard is able to send you mobile notifications about your car. All you have to do is plug the tiny device into your vehicle's onboard diagnostics port (OBD-II), which is found under the dashboard of most cars. Once installed, the Car Guard tracks everything that you could possibly want to know about your car. It's one of the most useful car accessories on the market.

Read more
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more