What Amazon's Astro Taught Me About Giving Robots a Soul

A former Amazon UX Sound Designer reflects on the character design decisions behind Astro, the company's home robot, arguing that embodied AI products inevitably acquire character in users' minds whether designers plan for it or not. The piece is a thoughtful practitioner account of how sound, motion, and narrative coherence combine to create the experience of presence, and where the Astro project fell short. As a wave of new embodied AI products approaches the market, the argument that character design deserves the same rigor as feature engineering feels both urgent and underheeded.