Meet temi - a personal assistant robot

Building a robot is a demanding journey, especially if it is a domestic one. Everything must happen in real time, and you need plenty of hardware specialists, tonnes of advanced sensors, and a CPU strong enough to handle its performance. The temi project was envisioned and designed to replace the Android operating system and become the heart and brain of temi’s headtablet. What were the biggest challenges?

• The temi robot was built from scratch: hardware, design and software;

• Neither the temi developers nor Netguru used these particular technologies (e.g. Natural Language Processing) in such a context before;

• The software part of the temi robot was developed by three teams scattered around the world - in Israel, China, and Poland.

To tackle the challenge of building a personal assistant robot from scratch, a lot of effort was put into research and testing. Then we held a scoping session for the framework of the launcher for temi. The goal was to find the best use-cases of architectures and technologies for the project. As soon as we split the responsibilities between the teams, we started work on three platforms: the robot’s operating system (Android-based), an iOS app, and an Android app.

We also had to handle voice recognition, video loads, and fast data processing in the cloud. We did this in the following steps:

• Netguru team focused on R&D and iterative cycles to come up with the best possible technology for any given task;

• We included temi in our agile culture and processes. Bi-weekly sprints, quality assurance, code review, retrospectives and planning, backlog grooming, and daily standups were applied to the project;

• In order to collaborate seamlessly as if we were an integral part of the temi team, we suggested common work grounds: Jira, Slack, and Bitrise.

Not only did we support the temi team with our software skills (Android and iOS), but we also introduced the global robotics company to our agile culture, principles, and processes. In hindsight, this turned out to be the best workflow for this project.

The temi software was developed by three teams scattered around the world, in Israel, China, and Poland. But even though not present at temi’s headquarters, Netguru’s teams, ‘veterans’ of remote software consulting and development, were able to resolve any issues and glitches in temi’s performance in real time. What is also extremely important, we were always there to help temi’s team define and set priorities for the project’s software development.

The personal assistant robot, temi, has received fantastic feedback from testers, industry experts, and media outlets. temi also gathered a round of applause at industry events in the US and Europe. Major milestones achieved together with temi’s developers include:

• The Netguru team developed the robot’s operating system (Android-based);

• We also developed an iOS app and an Android app for controlling the robot;

• An open Android SDK (temi SDK platform) was built, which allows third-party developers to write custom apps for temi;

• The Netguru team started to develop a set of apps for temi.

temi is on the way to leading the market of home robotics. It will win the hearts of the users in no time, as it is a premium device at a reasonable price. A personal assistant everybody can afford.