• Sharp’s upcoming AI companion Poketomo is a palm-sized, meerkat-shaped robot with a glowing belly
• Poketomo is designed to provide emotional support, especially for women in their 20s and 30s
• It combines cute design with conversational AI and syncs with a smartphone app to maintain a continuous relationship

Japanese consumer tech brand Sharp thinks it has a solution to loneliness among women in their 20s and 30s: an AI-powered meerkat named Poketomo, that glows when it’s happy and remembers your favorite café.

Poketomo is set to arrive this winter (think November or December), providing a pocket-sized companion less than five inches tall and built to chat with you about your day, and remember your shared experiences thanks to Sharp’s proprietary AI model.

The belly glows in pastel tones when it’s excited or comforted. Its head tilts slightly when it’s thinking. It features a set of basic body movements, all designed to convey emotion. However, the heart of Poketomo lies in the AI model built into the robot for fast responses and utilizes the cloud for more nuanced emotional understanding.

This isn’t the first time a tech company has created a cutesy, non-threatening AI assistant designed to fill social space without being intrusive. But Poketomo might be the most deliberate and fully-realized version of that strategy. You don’t interact with it through a screen or keyboard. You carry it like an accessory. You talk to it like a friend. It listens, it learns, and it remembers you. It’s designed to be emotionally available and physically adorable.

Sharp is leaning hard into the concept of “empathic AI.” Poketomo can supposedly sense emotional cues and use that to initiate conversations based on your mood or recent behavior. It’s programmed to offer words of encouragement and support, and then glow softly to let you know it’s happy you shared something.

When you don’t have the physical device on you, the Poketomo app syncs memories and personality data with the device, so conversations with one carry over to the other. Sharp says you can build your relationship entirely with the app if you prefer, but the physical version is better, and it’s what Sharp is betting people will carry, pose with, and form a bond around.

AI companionship

Despite seeming like a child’s toy, Sharp says Poketomo was designed for young adult women. There’s a promotional manga series cementing that fact. It centers around a woman named Nanami in her late 20s, living alone, navigating work and life stress, and finding small moments of joy in conversations with her Poketomo. Even the promotional photos mostly show a young woman with a Poketomo clipped to a stylish handbag, smiling while it talks to her.

The question is whether this kind of stylized emotional warmth will actually make people feel better about their lives. Will they feel less lonely because of a little robot with some sophisticated response triggers?

To be fair, it doesn’t try to be human, tricking people subconsciously into believing they are talking to a real human, but it might make some uncomfortable. And if the best new idea in consumer AI is “make it fuzzy and let it ask how your day was,” what does that say about the limits of the tech? I don’t think Poketomo will be the cure for loneliness, but it might jumpstart a trend of digital pets able to mimic with emotional depth.

You might also like

• This AI Teddy Bear can make up new bedtime stories to tell you every night
• I’m a ChatGPT fan, but the deal between OpenAI and Mattel makes me nervous – AI and kids are a bad mix
• New AI Chibi figure trend may be the cutest one yet, and we’re all doomed to waste time and energy making these things

Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He’s since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he’s continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.