Iván Hernández Dalas: Emotional intelligence is ElliQ’s core strength, says Intuition Robotics

ElliQ is an AI care companion robot that aims to promote independence and healthy living for older adults. | Source: Intuition Robotics

ElliQ developer Intuition Robotics Inc. was founded in 2016 with a simple mission: to create a robot that could make a difference in people’s lives. The company’s founder and CEO, Dor Skuler, was working at a large tech firm at the time, and he wasn’t home a lot to be around his young daughter.

“My daughter, who was three at the time, called me one day and asked me if what I’m doing is important because I was never ever home,” Skuler told The Robot Report. “That was a really tough question for me, and the truth is that it wasn’t that important. I promised myself that the next startup, at least, will have the potential to be important.”

Around the same time, Skuler had cared for his grandfather after his grandmother passed away. His family hired a full-time caregiver, chosen entirely based on their technical skills in caregiving. While this caregiver was qualified in every way, Skuler said the arrangement was a failure. The family eventually hired another caregiver, with the same credentials, who blended well with the family. He said this taught him how crucial personality is for these scenarios.

“That led me to the conclusion that if we want technology to be involved in how we live our lives and to be good caregivers, utility is important, but not sufficient. It’s going to be the soft stuff,” Skuler said.

“I started looking at longevity as a problem set, with just a lack of modern caregivers and the growing sense of loneliness in modern society. It felt to me that if we want robotics to be able to take part in the solution, they have to learn to be empathetic,” he continued. “They have to hold a conversation and understand my granddad’s quirky sense of humor. That’s going to be the X factor, and not just the ability to navigate the home and to manipulate a bag of groceries without breaking them and putting them in the cupboard.”

Intuition focuses on emotional rather than physical intelligence

ElliQ is a completely stationary robot. Right now, many developers are promising to put fully embodied humanoid robots into homes in just a few years. Intuition Robotics has chosen not to worry about locomotion or mobility; instead, it’s focused entirely on “emotional intelligence.”

For Skuler, this emotional intelligence is crucial to make social robots truly fit for the home. For instance, putting ChatGPT on ElliQ isn’t going to enable it to build meaningful relationships with users, he asserted. While other companies may hire a human-robot interaction (HRI) consultant to handle these issues, Intuition takes the opposite approach, Skuler said.

“We’re in thousands of homes now, and for some of them for three years already. So I can tell you with a lot of confidence that our homes and human life is very messy and complicated,” he said. “To provide true utility, you need to blend into that in a natural way, and you need to understand the etiquette of that in a natural way.”

Intuition said it has made emotional intelligence its core competence. Skuler acknowledged that household robots will likely need both emotional intelligence and physical intelligence to perform tasks. But for now, Intuition is focusing on the relationship side of things.

“ElliQ becomes, at the very least, a friend and a roommate, and sometimes more than that. To do that, you need to develop another stack, just like the stacks for indoor navigation, stair climbing and manipulation, and sensing,” explained Skuler. “We created, essentially, a social interaction stack, and that starts with initiating the conversation and not waiting for a prompt.”

How to blend into the home while improving people’s lives

Skuler said his design team quickly found that many people found fully humanoid robots a bit creepy, but they were more open to something like ElliQ, which he called an “objectoid.” ElliQ looks more like a lamp that comes to life rather than a person.

This is also why the team didn’t give ElliQ a human name. “We take active effort to do the opposite of the Turing test,” Skuler said. “So ElliQ will actively remind its users all the time that it’s an AI and not a human, for uncanny valley concerns. And also, I think, ethically, it’s the right thing to do.”

But for all the effort that Intuition Robotics has taken to make ElliQ blend in, it has also worked to make sure it interrupts daily operations on its own. ElliQ makes interruptions based on specific goals, like increasing exercise, wanting to learn new things, or staying on top of any health issues they might have, that the user sets.

Currently, around 60% of interactions with ElliQ are initiated by AI, not by the human, said Skuler. While making ElliQ proactive is crucial, it’s also challenging to get these interruptions right.

“How do you decide when the right person and the right time to engage with an individual?” Skuler asked. “That’s a confidence level. So there are all these algorithms with lots of signals that go into the algorithms, that give us a confidence score. Based on that score, we will choose the optimal level of productivity.”

At the most intrusive level, ElliQ will turn to the user and start talking. But at a less intrusive level, ElliQ might flash something on its screen or turn on a light to grab someone’s attention. In the end, these interruptions are about motivating users to keep up with their goals.

“It’s not enough just to store the memories, but to synthesize them and then make the connection that, at this specific conversation, what I really need to do is bring up that specific memory in order to motivate you to take an action that will cause you to uplift one of those goals,” said Skuler.

ElliQ adjusts to its user’s personality

ElliQ has some ability to adjust its personality to fit each user, said Intuition Robotics.

“So, you are you, but there are different flavors of you depending on who the audience is,” Skuler said. “I’m seeing a certain aspect of you right now, but then later on, you’ll go hang out with friends at a bar, and they’ll see a different aspect of you, but it’s still you. And maybe with your parents, there’s a different version of you, and with your boss, yet another version of you.”

“It’s kind of like that,” he added. “ElliQ has a very consistent persona, but she has a different flavor of her personality, and based on the human subject in front of her, she will drift more towards different flavors or different colors of her personality.”

Looking forward, Skuler said the latest advances in generative AI represent a “radical change” for social robots. Originally, ElliQ was a neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)-type product.

Now, it uses a large language model (LLM) to enable open-ended conversations in certain areas. Intuition Robotics plans to further integrate this technology in the future.

Editor’s note: RoboBusiness 2025, which will be on Oct. 15 and 16 in Santa Clara, Calif., will feature tracks on physical AI, enabling technologies, humanoids, field robotics, design and development, and business. Registration is now open.