BOCCO emo

BOCCO emo is a family communication robot: a small, permanently plugged-in figure that sits in the hallway or kitchen and moves voice messages between household members and their phones. A child home from school can speak to it and a parent at work receives the recording; the reply comes back out of the robot's speaker. Optional accessories extend the same idea into presence sensing, with a vibration sensor and a door-key sensor that report activity at home. It is the second generation of a product line that began with BOCCO in 2015. What emo added was expressiveness: the head and body move, the cheeks change colour, and the robot performs a repertoire of small reactions, plus a microphone array, speech recognition and speech synthesis. Yukai crowdfunded it on CAMPFIRE in December 2020, closing at nearly fifteen times the target, and put it on sale on 1 March 2021 at 44,000 yen. The Wi-Fi model now lists at 52,800 yen; a separate LTE version is offered on rental for households without Wi-Fi. The hardware is modest and honest about it. The robot is 95 by 95 by 141 millimetres, weighs 400 grams, runs on a mains adapter with no battery, and needs a Wi-Fi router and a smartphone to function at all. There is no camera. Because the microphone and cloud connection are central rather than optional, BOCCO emo sits at the opposite end of Yukai's own catalogue from Qoobo, which deliberately hears nothing. On 28 August 2026 Yukai turned on a generative-AI conversation mode, sold as a premium plan at 1,700 yen a month. In that mode the robot recognises who is speaking, remembers what was said and carries context between conversations, and an illustrated version of the same character appears in the app's chat room. A free update went to every owner at the same time: the robot can now be woken by poking it or pressing its function button instead of only by name, and the recording window grew from six seconds to ten.

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Yukai built its name on robots that hear nothing. Its family robot now remembers your conversations for 1,700 yen a month

9/9/2026 · Yukai Engineering (PR Times)

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