Jibo is dead. Long live Jibo.

Jibo is dead. Long live Jibo.

Jibo was a cute, social robot that sat in one place in your home. Built in 2014, Jibo was meant to be a robot people brought into their lives before the smart-home industry had even really taken off. (It preceded Amazon’s popular Echo speakers.) It could not interact with objects or move from its spot, but it could wiggle and talk in a way that felt endearing. It was adorable, but not competent or in demand enough to last—it was ahead of its time and died too soon.

Now, Jibo is being reborn, sort of, in a different form. The focus seems far less on the friendly robot and more about making a camera that can turn real-life moments into AI-generated images. A company called Lingverse (formerly known as Ling AI) says it raised $29 million in funding to build a new wearable AI device it calls the iKairos. It can be worn as a pendant or clipped onto your clothes. It can also be placed into a table mount where it sits, Jibo-like, taking in its surroundings.

Details on what exactly it can do are scant, though the company claims you can ask it questions, offload some tasks, and do basically anything modern AI software voice assistant devices can do. Lingverse says the device will likely cost between $199 and $249, likely with a subscription service that offers other AI features.

The name comes from the Greek word Kairos, which loosely translated means “the right moment.” (It also sounds like “Icarus,” the name of the famed figure of Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun. The company says that’s not deliberate.) It was given that name because this moment, namely the generative AI boom, seems better suited to this kind of artificial personal assistant than ever before.

“It's the right time to combine all the stuff,” Jiawei Gu, Lingverse’s CEO, told WIRED. “With iKairos, we are carrying forward Jibo's original dream.”

Exactly what aspects of that original dream iKairos plans to replicate is unclear. While not part of Jibo’s founding team, Gu was a board member before the company went under. Lingverse says the product is made with “the blessing of Jibo’s founding team,” but it does not own the intellectual property rights to Jibo—despite listing Jibo as a “product” on its website. The company says it does hold several of Jibo's core patents, but would not disclose which ones.

Gu and the company aren’t ready to share specific details about what the iKairos will be capable of. In its press release, Lingverse says the iKairos will “continuously observe both you and your surroundings” and “begin to act as a personal AI guardian,” but did not clarify how that would function.

iKairos works as both a wearable and a mounted home device, so it can collect data from the wearer’s perspective and from a stationary position. Put the device on the mount, and it will watch you and gather data about how you interact in the world. Having the option of those different viewpoints aims to give the iKairos more of a holistic sense of what is happening around it. Those details, apparently, can then be transformed into AI-generated images.

After announcing its funding on Wednesday, Lingverse’s website for the iKairos now describes it as an “AI journal,” with the slogan “Every starred moment becomes a capsule. iKairos watches for what matters, then seals it.” What that seems to mean—based on the visual imagery on the site—is that when the iKairos is placed in the home, it will capture moments around it and turn them into AI-generated images as memories. The images on the website look uncanny—very much like AI slop.

“It captures your day effortlessly, and at the end of each day, it generates a reflection for you,” wrote a Lingverse media representative in response to questions from WIRED. “Over time, living alongside iKairos helps you understand yourself a little better, and makes it easy to look back on where you've been.”

Lingverse is no stranger to AI-generated content. It has also developed the popular Luka AI Reading bot. At CES 2026, the company showed off its Luka AI cube, a camera-enabled kids’ device that can answer questions about the world and turn artwork into unsettling talking AI videos.

When asked how iKairos keeps the generated images from devolving into AI slop, a representative for the company pushed back, saying the company will check images for quality and let users choose which images they prefer after capturing a moment.

“Every image comes from real moments the device actually captured,” the Lingverse spokesperson wrote in an email to WIRED. “Before anything enters your journal, it passes a quality gate that cross-references the visual scene with the audio context of that moment—where you were, who was with you, what was said.”

On the privacy front, Lingverse says the iKairos does not record video, instead using the camera to take snapshots of the environment that it later deletes. The device only records audio when a human voice is detected. It will have a physical camera shutter and that data will be processed on device or encrypted in transit, and won’t be used to train the AI models.

Lingverse says presales of the iKairos are planned to kick off later this year. Where the device will fit in the broadening market of AI home devices is even less clear. Tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Google are betting big on the next generation of smart speakers. Google just introduced its newest AI-enabled smart speakers last month. OpenAI, in its partnership with design legend Jony Ive, is also expected to make a home assistant of some sort, and Apple is rumored to be working on a home hub with an iPad-like screen.

And if you’re looking for AI journals, there are plenty of products on the market already, like the Bee AI wearable or Looki L1 AI bodycam. If you really want to AI-ify your family photos, even Google Photos already lets you do that. We'll have to wait to learn more, but Lingverse is not shy about leveraging Jibo's legacy to hype up its new hardware, whether or not the iKairos can live up to the beloved robot.