How Sony Gave a Machine a Soul

The Story Behind Sony’s AIBO Robot Dog

In the late 1990s, while the world obsessed over digital cameras and DVDs, Sony quietly set out to build something entirely different. Not a tool or a toy, but a piece of technology that gave the illusion of life.

This is the story of Sony’s most personal experiment. It wasn’t a product in the usual sense. It was a question wrapped in circuitry, asking whether something mechanical could make you believe, even for a moment, that it had a soul.

For more than twenty years, that question kept echoing through breakthroughs, cancellations, revivals, and thousands of small dogs that never stopped trying to be loved.

They called them AIBO.

In 1993, Toshitada Doi, already a legend inside Sony for developing the company’s first digital audio recorder and later co-creating the Compact Disc, traveled to MIT out of pure curiosity. He had heard about the breakthroughs happening at the AI Lab and wanted to see firsthand how American researchers were rethinking intelligence and autonomy. For Doi, it was about chasing inspiration wherever it might be found.

There, on a cluttered workbench, he watched a small, six-legged robot named Genghis crawl across a table as it responded to the world and made decisions, and in that moment, Doi didn’t see a machine but something alive, and the idea took root.

He returned to Tokyo with a thought he couldn’t shake. What if a machine didn’t just respond to commands, but responded to you? What if it could exist in your home not as a tool, but as a presence?

Slowly the vision began to take shape. Not as a humanoid or a toy, but as a creature that could understand you, react to you, and make you feel something. Just a presence, moving, learning, simply existing by your side.

Now, here’s the full story. How a backroom experiment turned into one of Sony’s most original creations. How it lived, died, and came back again. And why AIBO still matters today.