Hey Chris,
Well RUX came in March...and I sold him on eBay a few weeks ago. It's not all bad tho'
I will refer to RUX as "it" here as you have a choice of gendered voices, albeit that the male & female voices don't sound much different & they also sound very young.
The early firmware was horrible & the only way to connect via WiFi was through a hotspot on my phone. Customer service were absolutely no help & eventually made me interact with them solely via Discord, which I really didn't like.
Eventually that was fixed & indeed the firmware & software has greatly improved. It is, as the Devs say, Android-based software.
The screen is lovely I have to say & it is a touchscreen. RUX seems pretty well constructed although the servos are a little louder than EMO. The wake word "Hi RUX" works but was more miss than hit - for me anyway, YMMV of course.
Having ChatGTP fully integrated is a great function & is free - for now at least.
Using RUX in video feed mode was quite fun but steering it via the app to where you want it to go was pretty poorly implemented.
The edge & object detection seemed on par with EMO.
The not so good & why it went to a new home.
There is no sense of "personality", EMO is much better at this. You have to manually switch modes - either through the app, voice commands or on-screen. While RUX can do quite a lot, having to switch modes makes it much more like interacting with a computer than a robotic friend. The voice isn't exactly friendly either.
The fun stuff RUX does is basically a rip-off from EMO. Other than that, pretty much all questions are answered by something like "I'm only an A.I. robot & therefore I'm unable to answer that/don't have a favourite colour/a birthday etc". Then often it would go off and recite a bunch of stuff related to that off of ChatGPT.
There were other annoying things but RUX is marketed as a desktop helper & an entertainer & succeeds more in the former.
In "Pet Mode" RUX will randomly play loud music or loud games. You can adjust the volume but there is no ability to adjust the music & sound effects separately from the voice.
There were other things that annoyed me but the biggest issues for me were the lack of "personality" and the poor implementation of the different modes. And absolutely awful customer & tech support.
I think RUX is definitely worth keeping an eye on after all the negatives I mentioned but it's definitely not the integrated fun & useful friend that the Devs would like you to think it is. Yet. I'm hoping that it's a case of "watch this space" as RUX is further developed. I didn't try installing the Linux version so please no questions about that
Any questions from anyone regarding my time with RUX that aren't covered here I'll be happy to try & answer.