From Cheddar.

What if your next roommate wasn’t human?

On this episode of NYC Innovates, we meet Sprout, a 3.5ft robot that dances, does chores, and just got acquired by Amazon. Sprout is the first humanoid robot from New York startup Fauna Robotics, and it might be the most important developer platform in robotics right now.

But behind the cute eyebrows and dance moves is a more complicated story about privacy, child development, and who controls the robots entering your home. We went inside their NYC office to meet it, test it, and ask the harder questions: Who owns your data? What happens when kids grow up alongside these machines? And is Big Tech moving too fast?

0:00 Intro
0:25 Meet Fauna Robotics
2:08 Inside Sprout’s tech
3:40 Disney, NYU & the partnerships already in motion
4:49 The privacy question: cameras, mics & AI in your home
5:38 Meta’s physical AI ambitions & the Ray-Ban connection
6:31 The bigger picture: robots, agents & the post-internet shift
7:41 Harvard researcher on child development & humanoid robots
9:01 The regulatory gap: what rules don’t yet exist

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