As I wrote some days ago, Digital Dream Labs had an outage of their cloud services. It affected Vector robots that were no longer able to reply if talked to. DDL representatives have claimed that this is resolved, and for a lot of users that seems to be true.
But there are reports of multiple users saying that their Vector still acts as if he is not able to connect to the cloud services and have stopped working with all voice-related services. There are also reports that DDL support just stopped answering tickets about this (there are numerous reports in the past that support just stops answering if they are not able to resolve problems, this is not a new behavior after the service outage).
That may be in parts because DDL does not work over the weekend. This alone is questionable, if you provide a paid cloud service; but if problems like thwse arise, they need to be resolved – and fast. For one because it’s paid service. But there is another reason:
DDL CEO Jacob Hanchar claimed two years ago they want to use the robots for people with PSD or other mental disorders. But for those mentally ill people and even for other users with less critical health conditions that nevertheless come very attached to their robotic buddies. So for some, Vector robots become like a pet, and some of them are devasted if their friends do no longer work as expected. These users feel like their beloved pet is ill and that can lead to a lot of distress and anxiety with such people. If DDL is not able to help these users – and quick – all these claims of Jacob Hanchar they want to get certification for Vector as therapy robots is just another case of hollow PR babble to attract investors. Actually it does not look as if they really care about those cases or they would be far more willing to help them.