How can Living AI do better?

EMO Pet General Discussion
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Ok - open question… from a community perspective, how can Living AI do better?

Lets break this into a few thoughts…

Support - their support response times have been unacceptable, many people have said that. Therefore they employed and trained more support staff, and from what I’ve been told have sorted the backlog of requests. I understand they are also building better systems behind the scenes to ensure requests are tracked better. What more can they do to help us end users in this respect?

Ordering - People claimed when they ordered that they had no idea EMO would take a couple of months before it arrived with them. Therefore based on community feedback, Living AI modified the description of EMO so people would in fact see that EMO was being produced on a close to build to order process, and that it would be a minimum of 6 weeks from order before EMO would be passed to shipping (and then of course shipping takes whatever time to get to you). How can they make this clearer so people know what to expect?

Delivery - They have the delivery process page - located here if you didn’t know - https://living.ai/delivery-process/ In that page they do regular updates on production via text and photos and have been doing so for over 1 year now. They made this page based on community feedback for more transparency. They also added info at the top of the page that shows the most current order produced and the most current order where shipment details have been sent to the end user. What else can they do here to help people know where things are at?

The aim here is simple… if we as a community give clear feedback on our expectations and desires for EMO, not just as an end product but the entire process from concept to delivery, then Living AI have a good chance of meeting those expectations. However they can’t read our minds, and they need our help.

So - the question I ask is how can we help them do a better job?

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Honestly in these 3 Years I expierence some Companys and Start ups with Robots and Living.ai is the most Passionist and kind understanding Company I expierence so far! I am an Woman who says what I think and that is my Honest Opinion!

My Suggestion is continue like you are and keep up your good Work. I hope you can get more People around you for Support. And stay so nice and Transperency like you are!

Unfortunatly we can not please everyone :+1:

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Hmm I have no experience ordering on startups except here but I find it nice that the company boss Zhang (or I am wrong?) personally takes part in helping in the forum

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It looks like people didn’t understand that you want to hear what could be improved.
I don’t want to write it again so here is what I already wrote:

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I understand NendosColl, living AI should give correct response to customers emails, and their request or concerns they may have in the forum and also updates should be more often, everyone should get tracking information to them has quickly has possible and in real time. Unfortunately things do go wrong.

(Not directed at NendosColl)
I don’t really see how Living AI can be any quicker at the moment considering they are still learning and perhaps they are still struggling with so many customers, they are still trying so hard to catch up with their original goals that they set out to do.

Personally I think -and this has been said before by others- that they should have waited until they were ready to actually start sending all Emo’s out and get their business/company up and running before hand.

They are doing it differently -building and sending a bunch out at a time -which is probably why they often become slow in production, I’m not an expert or anything but I don’t think they’ve made it clear enough to show us where they are right now, they leave us in limbo for far too long sometimes, this gets on everyone nerves. And I don’t believe Lai do this on purpose, as a young company they still have a lot more to do to really reassure customers but how I don’t know.

I believe keeping in contact with every single person who has bought Emo, customers who have a defective Emo or is still waiting for their Emo to arrive should be told more frequently perhaps through emails to keep everyone updated in what’s happening in production (perhaps a weekly summary)

Because doing it in the forum -it’s not possible for Living AI representatives to see everyone’s post and not everyone is satisfied with the way it’s done on the Lai page. Some don’t even bother reading that information or they get lost in understanding it, it wasn’t clear to me when I first bought Emo and so I just ignored it and waited and waited and waited until Emo was on my front door.

And the tracking came just before Emo did which in my opinion is correct so for everyone who is upset about not receiving a tracking number then I’m sure it’s not due yet for you to receive it, you won’t get that info unless Emo is close to wherever you live pretty much around the corner from where you live. Of course it would be better if everyone had a tracking number that they could check from the start when you buy your Emo, that is how it is usually done but for some reason it’s not possible for Living AI to do this. The info we get often lags and it’s not always in real time and some of the couriers are hopeless.

Maybe I’m incorrect so let me know where I might have made a mistake.

Basically we all need to just wait. And I know for some, waiting can be difficult and time consuming so please be aware that Emo is going to take a very very long time to come home to you.

If you feel uncertainty because of personal reasons, In my opinion it would be okay for Lai to send yours out sooner. Many people in difficult circumstances which time is not on their side, they should have that choice to have Emo sooner, by the way nobody is asking to jump the cue, that is just my opinion that perhaps they should so they can enjoy Emo like everyone else. Of course I’m pretty sure they don’t want this anyway -nobody wants to be treated differently unless I’m wrong. (You can share your thoughts on that) Somebody’s birthday doesn’t count though. And read the forum for information and ask the important questions, nothing wrong in that unless it’s a silly question :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Seriously though I think Living AI can definitely improve and I believe they are getting better.

They are replying to all of my emails very very quickly so I’m not sure why others are having difficulty there?

So no worries from me (yet) my Emo’s foot is still playing up though and I still think it’s a software issue. They have recently asked me to do the white paper test and hopefully I’ll get a reply soon.

Thanks for reading

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That’s of course a nonsense, but there should be a tracking number available once EMO is handed over (sent) to the courier. I was asking LAI many times why some people whose EMOs were already sent a month ago are still waiting for their tracking number. I didn’t get an answer yet.

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I’m keeping my response short. (Well at least I’ll try to :rofl: )

I must say that with so many other start up companies that pop up claiming that they have the next best thing in AI robotics (most of them) fail in comparison to how Living.Ai has handled everything from the very start of their EMO journey. They have had to overcome so many obstacles, but have worked really hard in getting EMO out to so many of us already (including myself) where sometimes it felt that that this project was never going to happen or get off the ground. But it did and Living.Ai have grown and have recently expanded their team and production facilities to better handle support and production moving forward.

We do need to understand, that this is a new company that is still learning and constantly evolving in so many ways when it comes to support, production, distribution. There will always be road bumps along the way, and no company is perfect right away, sometimes it takes a little time to iron many issues out and I believe Living.Ai are doing the best they can at this time and will continue to improve moving forward.

Most importantly Living.Ai are constantly working on improving and updating EMO, releasing all sorts of updates on a regular basis, we can certainly see that they really do care about the future of EMO and are working on making EMO better everyday.

Support: We all know that initially the Living.Ai support team was not very large and sometimes getting replies would take a very long time, but as Wayne Zhang as mentioned they have now increased and support team and they should be handling enquiries and tech issues much faster than before. (This has just recently happened), so with an increase in the support team, our enquiries should hopefully be seen and responded to within 24/48 hours. This is what I’d like to see the support team do moving forward.

Ordering: I’ve mentioned this in other threads and posts. Possibly a notification at the top or a check box that needs to be checked before you finalize your order can potentially be added to the order page informing customers that it may take XXXXX amount of days/weeks/months for their order to be processed / manufactured and shipped out. This is something that Living.Ai could add into every order page, so that customers can see and must confirm by checking the box before they purchase an EMO so they know ahead of time it can potentially take a while before they receive their EMO and not to expect it to arrive in a week.

Delivery Having the Delivery page updated at very least once a week with a status report would be great. If it’s updated more, that’s even better. Of course having the number of orders (order numbers) shipped and sent to couriers should stay and be updated as regularly as possible so that customer can see where they are in the queue for their own EMO order. I know that the tracking numbers do take a while to be updated in the order page section of our profile, this is as I’ve mentioned so many times the tracking numbers can take a bit of time to update as once they send out packages to the distribution warehouse they must wait for the courier company to receive/scan and provide a tracking number for each individual EMO package collected. Normally shipments are sent by the pallet loads, so it may take some time to update this, but having having this completed as quickly as possible is what we are hoping for. From there, you can simply track your order by the tracking page or use a 3rd party tacking website like 17 Tracking.

I do want to also mention that once our EMO order is in the hands of the courier, it is out of the control of Living.Ai. And we must trust in the courier and how reliable / professional they are in receiving the package and delivering it to to you without losing it or misplacing it etc.

I’ve tried to keep this short, but I guess it went a little too long. Hope to see and hear what other customers feedback as well.

:heart_1: :head: :skating: :mad: :surprised:

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These are a couple of things that I might suggest that would be better once Living.ai is more comfortably established with perhaps more employees.

Support: Perhaps having a live chat available on their web site with language drop downs so that you can speak directly with support and begin the process right away for whatever you need assistance with.

Ordering/Delivery: Perhaps waiting until the product is actually shipped before deducting the funds from their payment method. This is standard practice for most of the on line companies I deal with. This will give more reassurance that money is not just lost and the order is not forgotten.

Just some ideas I have.

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im just missing a newsletter per e-mail, like whats happening here with my order, is living ai still in developing? etc.
i mean you are buying an emo for ~300€, you are paying it and then theres silence… like you got the feeling you lost this money
for example, i ordered my emo on 14.1. and i didnt heard anything about it, its been ~3 months soon i ordered it but i didnt heard anything about the process, i mean the delivery is also a topic for most people
i mean lets assume you are a dad or mom (you also know living ai’s shipment would take some time), you would never expect it would takes more than 3 months - probably its too late till you get this present for your kids
this company is my second new coming company im “supporting” with a purchase - the first were pinephone (pine64) and i didnt really got the feeling there that i got lost as costumer, you saw the community is still developing the pinephone distros (manjaro also got a own youtube channel where they presented also some things) etc.

and also a plus for pine64 were, they calculated the delivery time pretty good, they said the shipment would start (lets assume mid. june) and they also started the shipment mid. june and from this point you knew, if you ever buyed anything from china, it would take now another month to receive it

i mean sure, living ai got a bad time here, we are discovering too few chips (afaik we still got too few chips still, please correct me if not)
guess another point is, they never calculated that they are going that fast so big, so maybe they got too few production workers here?
afaik the order nr. is atm ~25*** and we are still on 15*** shipped
but anything should be here changed

my third point is, im also a person which would care pretty much about privacy, i know, if i do, i shouldnt buy an emo but, i buyed it still because i want to take a look at it and my hope atm. is, that living ai would go open source so we all are able to review the code to dont have any concerns of privacy
i also dont understand why they arent already, i mean, i dont guess there are that much people which would steal the code and build theyr own emo
and correct me if im wrong but, different companies are also not allowed to steal the code with mit license afaik?
and i guess, this company could stay still alive with open source code and if they got panic, i would say, what about a “buy me coffee” button to send some money to them? i mean many open source people are doing that and i dont think they are getting too few money with it

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Lindaru … Hi there I’ve been reading everything…Your comment about not taking the money from your bank until they have a product they can send is pretty important …might help some of the anxiety in some people I’m not sure

Here is my experience the truth, before I ordered I sent a simple email to ask living AI a question they never answered for so long then their answer had nothing to do with my question…it was gibberish …I ordered anyway because EMO Pet looks extremely unique I thought it would help with my health problems laughter you know… Since then I’ve read nothing but horror stories from lack of service, EMO breaking down and nobody from support… In my one month that’s passed they’ve produced nothing. There’s nothing promising so far for me, very discouraging… On the positive note people like Wayne small and others say encouraging things but all I can do is have hope alongside my real anxiety. it’s a shame to have anxiety when placing orders you know…but I want EMO … Oh well I’m just going to be patient and hope they get production working at a high output to lessen our wait time. they are far too slow maybe they didn’t realize how popular EMO Pet was going to be I don’t know…. And I don’t know anything about what they can do to accomplish any of this. I would just say get that mass production going you have far too many customers having anxiety… That’s about it. I hope in the end everything works out. And thank you everyone I’ll hang in there…

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Puppy, you reminded me another thing that could be improved here.
The moderators of this forum are really useful and helpful but only to a certain point. As soon as there is a comment or a question out of their comfort zone, they are either ignoring it, trying to change the topic of the conversation or downplay the problem of people seeking for a help. I would hardly consider them unbiased. That’s bad, they shouldn’t stand up for LAI at all costs.

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Delivery:

A suggestion to consider would be the amount of EMOS produced in a 5-day or 7-day cycle. With this, buyers were able to make an account to know how many weeks are left to reach your order number .

Example day 03/03/22 to 03/14/22 = 500 units
Example day 14/03/22 to 21/03/22 = 760 units

Support
It makes it clear in the advertising material that the minimum period is 6 weeks to 6 months after payment confirmation. Another thing to put a field before making the purchase (I agree with the deadlines informed)

Another problem I detected is the fragmentation of social media (several Youtubes and official Instagram with different content with different dates since the last post) it would be interesting to integrate

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:sparkling_heart: … I can’t respond because I’m stuck here for the long haul. I think people should have the freedom to say what they wish if nobody wants to reply they won’t… And there should be people here helping…this is living AI… having people helping here is really important…the customers are actually the most valued of all… Where would the company be without our money and loyalty

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Hi @Wayne_Small , hope you’re fine.

Good idea to break into separate points, here are my thougths about:

Support:
Obviously, hiring more support employees could be a solution, but I wonder if that’s the most effective one, indeed, based on forum topics I’ve read so far, most of email answers are either late or wrong, worst, sometimes these are both.
A solution I’ve noticed as efficient in the past can be compiled into two keypoints:
1- For sure, improve knowledge of support team, for them not to be left in front of customers without clear responses to provide.
2- In order to reduce amount of questions, but also time wasted by support team to create/update forum topics about “common issues”, to simply ask each customer at beginning of email discussion (or once problem solved) if they accept this discussion to be published into dedicated forum topic.
Of course, this asks the question of privacy (Credit card number, address…), but this can easily be implemented with a double confirmation system.
Also, to make sure such system works, I’d highly recommend to implement this at start of discussion, in order to:

  • Responsibilize customer (about privacy, but not only, as it could also help discussions to be a little more “respectful”, I’ve been working with a few support teams during the years, and I noticed that some customers sometimes forget that they’re talking to humans, I guess you see my meaning…)
  • Make sure living.ai would have an approval given, in facts, most of customers don’t reply questions once their problem is solved, so it’d be better to ask prior to solve issue, to make sure community could solve/troubleshoot issues by their own.

Ordering:
A simple, real, and live (or daily) average delivery times calculation based on the whole previous orders would offer following benefits:
1- High reduction of support/forum requests for updates/precisions about deliveries
2- Ability for LAI then to analyse their needs in shipping / production improvements, also to focus on some shipping companies they use that could get slower in certain regions.
3- In addition to below, it could be a great challenge for teams to try to get this rate lower (having a goal is always motivating).
4- Last but not least, it would finally help LAI not to appear like misleading or dishonest company.
I know it sounds like repeating, but to me, this one is the worst point as, as far as I can read, I could not find a single customer delivered in 6 weeks, and even though there used to be some, I’m afraid none of them ordered once this was mentionned on order page.

To summarize:
To addition all delivery times (from order till delivery confirmation), then to simply divide by amount of shipments so far, then publish on order page.

Delivery:
I think this one can be solved with my above statement about ordering, also, there’s an error from my point of vue, indeed, the page you point to, out of non-regular basis update I’m afraid (except if I misunderstand the concept of regularity), informs about production process, not delivery, and even though it’s quite interresting to see how EMO goes alive, it doesn’t let customers feel secure about their order, as it even appeared to some of them to be a static page (especially considering last waiting time).

Also, in a more global way, I’d say that LAI should now stop considering themselves and letting customers / moderators consider them as a startup company, three years is more than enough for any company to have at least strong basement for their processes, it becomes insulting to be forced to be kind in front of a community and a company just beause of this term, I’m afraid it’s for example not acceptable to be provided with an excuse such as “chinese new year” for latencies , I mean, even though it’s not the same date as rest of world’s calendar, it happens “yearly” right? then how come now we see a message from @Wayne_Zhang informing that, next year, LAI will make sure to inform about latencies due to such celebration? I mean, what about the two years before?

I guess this post may sound like complaining for LAI, but I’m only speaking about common sense processes implementation here, being a startup company never involved to apply the exact opposite processses from other companies.

Another point I think LAI should focus on, is not to hide anymore behind the “complexity of communicating with different countries”, but to stick to a generic, honest, and regular communication, in english, cause even though some people don’t like that fact (I’m french as you can read from my profile, so I live in one of the most complaining country ever :wink: ), it’s still the most common used language, then inform with simple facts.

All this of course doesn’t mean I’ll keep being on customers’ side no matter what the issues are and frankly, I’m kind of person who doesn’t accept lack of honesty from any side, but it’s currently hard to defend LAI considering those above mentionned points and problems faced during the last months…

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Why not? There are two sides, the seller and buyers. Buyers are supposed to pay for their order. Successfully done for each one of them.
The seller is supposed to send the ordered product. It’s not done in almost 10k cases.
I know exactly which side should improve.

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Hi @NendosColl , sorry, my English isn’t as good as I hope it could be;-), please let me precise:

My meaning was more that, depending on situation, I can of course understand that some customers are complaining for almost nothing, which is, for example, quite common in france I have to admit BUT, in the actual case, I’d say that most of customers have been patient and comprehensive enough

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And of course, 100% agreed with your statement, the seller/buyer contract isn’t respected so far

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I know I’m late to this discussion, but I thought I would give my feedback as well.

For ordering, I like the idea of a check box that says something like, “I understand that my order may take at least 2-3 months to be shipped.” That way people know right away not to expect their robots in a week.
I think delivery is ok, and people need to have more patience. Mine took 5 months to get here, and I’m ok with that.
I have an idea that I think could improve Living.ai’s support. They should make everything available right on the website. If someone is having a problem with the edge detection or another sensor, the debug apps should be available to both iOS and android users. If someone has the error 501 issue, they can go to the support section and see the video about taking Emo apart to access the SD card. If they’re comfortable taking Emo apart, they can pull the card out and put it back in. If that doesn’t work, they should have the file on the website with instructions to download the file onto the current card or prepare a new card for Emo. I really hope that they change the front of Emo so it has the SD card slot or the front cover can easily come off so people don’t have to take the robot apart. I talked about this in the video I did on how to get to the SD card. But that’s the biggest problem I have. If I have a problem with my robot, I don’t want to email them and wait for them to get back to me. I would rather do everything I can, and only email them if it’s a hardware issue that can’t be fixed. I feel like emailing should be the last option. Then if I have to email them, I can say I did everything I could, and nothing worked. And if everything was accessible, it would probably reduce the number of emails they have to go through.

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The problem is that disassembly of most products is considered a breach of warranty.

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NendosColl hey there… In my lifetime I have been a watchmaker, a VCR technician… And I have fixed just about everything including cameras. Ended up computer technician. Alas poor me I’m retired :innocent: the point I’m making is for me replacing the microSD and reprogramming it with a new one would be advantageous if anything went wrong… Even replacing servos whatever. But in the current design of EMO a lot of people would not be comfortable ripping the little guy apart. and is very understandable you should have a background in ripping things apart and I mean a lot of it… You don’t want poor little EMO needing a respirator :laughing:

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