Cerebras SUPERNOVA 2025 | Adrian Mullan, Norby

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Adrian Mullan

CEO & Founder

Norby

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Language Learning and Speech Therapy with AI Assistant's Customization and Adaptation

play_circle_outline Maximizing Performance: Cerebras Collaboration for Hotel Concierge Multilingual Integration

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Adrian Mullan, Norby

Adrian Mullan

CEO & Founder Norby

Adrian Mullan, founder and chief executive officer of Norby Pty Ltd., joins theCUBE’s John Furrier at Cerebras SUPERNOVA 2025 to discuss the evolving intersection of robotics, language and personalized intelligence. Speaking from Fort Mason in San Francisco, Mullan introduces Norby, a voice-interactive platform designed to bring Pixar-style emotional intelligence to real-world applications.

The conversation explores how Norby leverages Cerebras’ AI technology to boost response speed and adaptability, opening doors for use in education, therapy and dy... Read more

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>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE. We are in San Francisco. The game is heating up here at Supernova. This is Cerebras' event. It's turning into quite the conference. We are in the the cool hangout startup room area. Adrian Mullen is here, CEO, founder of Norby. It's a great product. It's robotics meets human intelligence. Adrian, thanks for coming on theCUBE, pop-up CUBE.

Adrian Mullan

>> Thanks for having me. Excited to speak to you.

>> I feel like we're in the red carpet. It's like, "Hey, how do you think about Cerebras' event?" So before we talk about Cerebras and all the coolness and AI, talk about your product, what you guys are doing and the venture.

Adrian Mullan

>> Sure. So Norby is an interactive voice companion and we describe Norby, kind of like a Pixar version of ChatGPT in a robot form factor with a specific focus on voice interactions.

>> So is there software powered AI chips in there? Take us through what's powering this puppy.

Adrian Mullan

>> All of the above. So we do a lot of work in hardware and software, but we work with the folks at Cerebras for our inference on the LLM side of things, which has been a huge bonus in terms of speed.

>> So you can tell it's getting really kind of active in here. What's been the reaction? Is it shipping? What's going on with the product?

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, we're about to open up our pre-order campaign, so we'll have the units available to pre-order on our website and we're shipping out beta units end of July and hoping to get production units out by Thanksgiving.

>> All right, talk about what's involved. What's the, aside being cool, what's the relevance for the user piece? What's the main use cases? We've seen robotics really work well in people who are lonely. We've seen things where human assisted activities, obviously ChatGPT, pretty much anyone under the age of 30 uses it to run their life. I kind of do that too, even though I'm a little older. But you started to see the AI software change our real world experiences. What's the use cases for you guys?

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, absolutely. So there's three big ones. The first one is language learning. So a lot of people are using Norby at the moment to practice speaking a second language. If you've ever had to learn a language before, you'll know that reading, writing, spelling and grammar is the easy part. And the elephant in the room is particularly learning how to speak and pronounce things correctly. So effectively people are using Norby as a little companion to be able to go back and forth. The second big use case is we're starting to do a lot of work around health, around things like speech therapy. So anything from young kids that have say an articulation disorder and need to improve their speech, through to the elderly, like you mentioned, where they may be recovering from say a stroke or a traumatic brain injury or dementia and they need a partner to be able to go back and forth. And then lastly, the latest use case, which is getting quite a bit of traction at the moment, is effectively people using Norby as an AI assistant. So my one at home back in Melbourne sits beside my desk and it's actually plugged into my email, into my calendar, to my social media feeds. So every morning I can jump in, tap Norby on the head, and it'll actually give me a breakdown of, "Okay, here are the important things in your inbox."

>> It's that chief of staff for you.

Adrian Mullan

>> Essentially, yeah.

>> "Don't send that email. Wait a day." We've all been there.

Adrian Mullan

>> Absolutely.

>> I love the use cases because again, I've seen such a great spectrum of robotics go from corner cases. Like I said, I interviewed an entrepreneur, he was doing a use case where homes where people, elderly were lonely and the robots changed their life expectancy. Now you're getting into mainstream language. I mean, we've all had the books, the tapes and iPod, now the iPhone, now the apps, now this. So again, the immersive experiences. When you guys started, was that kind of like, or you guys just let's build a cool robot? How did this all start?

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, I started the project several years ago, originally for my own daughter. So she was learning Chinese at the time. We were sending her to Mandarin school on Saturdays. She would come home looking very miserable. I actually had to go through the same thing as a kid 35 years ago. So my mom's Chinese, my dad's Irish. I spent many a Saturday going to Chinese school. Super tough language, a lot of rote learning, a lot of repetition.

>> The Irish dialect, by the way, so you can learn some of that. If you go to Ireland, you probably know. So it's lonely, when she's coming home. Who do I talk to? How a conversational rapport? Practicing, is that was the problem?

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, so effectively, anyone who's got kids will know that it's a bit of a moving target. So their interests change over time. So you might have say the three-year-old that loves trains and then four, its dinosaurs and five its space and so on. So for us, the holy grail is really the ability to be able to adapt to their interests over time. So we do a lot of work with Norby, with memory, whereas the user interacts with the device, it customizes the interactions.

>> It's a beautiful robot. I love it. What's going on with the software, the chips? Not to get nerded out here, but I'm interested because we're at Cerebras, their fastest tokens out, fastest tokens that they can stream out. Better tokens, better intelligence. That's the AI side. How does this get smarter? How do you guys bridge that form factor with say, Cerebras or other things? What's the thinking around the architecture?

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, with all AI use cases, but especially things that involve speech, humans are very sensitive to latency. So we've used a bunch of providers before where the performance has been quite good, but the speed is just not there yet. So thankfully with Cerebras, we're able to cut down the latency dramatically, which makes a huge difference as you are going back and forth. We do a lot of work to be able to optimize the audio quality on device and then partnering with those guys has been great.

>> What's the coolest use case that kind of jumps out at you that you didn't expect, a user or a corner case?

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, look at the moment, to be honest, the problem that we have is we have so many people coming to us for all sorts of different use cases. One developer in particular is actually looking at setting up Norby's basically as an AI concierge inside hotel rooms. So the idea is that if you fly in from out of town, you'll have a Norby there that's plugged into the hotel system, and it'll know what level the gym is on. You'll be able to order room service and you'll be able to do it in 40-plus different languages.

>> Send all my Netflix settings, I'm coming in. I'm going to be tired. Make me feel better. Welcome back, John. I know you're all alone again, CUBE trip. I mean, this is kind of the socialization piece, the humanization.

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah. And look, to be honest with you, this is not a new idea. People have been trying to do this literally since the '60s. The problem traditionally has been you've had to build every level of the stack yourself. Whereas now, we feel like the stars are sort of starting to align and it's actually at the stage where with people Cerebras, it's mature enough to be able to put out into production.

>> What is the business plan for you guys? What's the strategy? Make this, so you're doing all the heavy lifting and then software plugs in? Are you thinking you guys will have that up and down the stack? What's the scalable strategy you guys see?

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, so initially we're doing a lot of work directly with consumers basically to be able to get feedback. So we have a really large list of beta users where they're using it for things like language learning, speech therapy and so on. But eventually, we'll transition to focusing on the platform and then we'll enable developers to be able to plug in all of the fun agentic use cases.

>> I was talking with Michael Dell of the last Dell Check World, and I also talked to some of their corporate dev and their strategy people because we are analysts, we cover them. They asked me a question, "What's the future of the personal computer?" And I went little rogue and I'm like, "Well, my relationship with the computer is my phone. It's a collection of everything connected." And if you think about the PC, we're living in a world where our devices are multi-fold. There's a lot of devices, not one thing. I use my PC all the time when I'm banging out some work products, when I'm on a plane. So now things are becoming an extension of our computing. What's your thoughts on that, reaction to that, and how does that manifest into a user experience? I mean, it should be, it senses who I am. I got my own model, I swipe it over to the device. I mean, I'm making this up, but the vibe is there.

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, look, it's interesting that you mentioned that. I think we're in a really exciting time at the moment. Personally, I think that the two big form factors over the next decade will be embodied devices and wearables. Smartphones are great. We can't live without them, but unfortunately, I think most people will agree, they've kind of become a bit of a victim of their own success. If you think about the sort of use cases that we do, things like language learning, you really want to be able to keep the user in a flow state, which is difficult to do with an app on your phone because the moment you start interacting, a notification pops up, someone tries to call you, or you get distracted by TikTok or social media-

>> You're interrupted.

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, absolutely.

>> Well, I love the flow state because that's life, but there's no flow state device, because you're being interrupted by other things that are different contexts, work, that doesn't understand the awareness.

Adrian Mullan

>> Correct.

>> So I mean, just a straw band question for you. How many people do you know carry two phones? Almost all my friends do now.

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah.

>> I go, "Why do you carry two phones?" "One got WhatsApp, one's got Telegram, one's a work phone." So I mean, people are literally carry around two phones in some cases, two iPhones, some cases an Android and an iPhone. So they're carrying two phones.

Adrian Mullan

>> Yep, absolutely.

>> That's insane. No, but why? Because they want different things.

Adrian Mullan

>> Correct, correct. Yeah. And look, personally, I would say 90% of the day I've got notifications switched off and my phone on D&D just because I don't want to be interrupted. So I think increasingly as the underlying technology, these foundational models get smarter, we'll be able to build these interactions where people can just go back and forth naturally with speech.

>> Digital, physical relationship, first party flow state, steady state, context aware, situational. "Hey, I'm in family mode right now, leave me alone." Or, "Hey, I'm in work mode. Give me notifications."

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, well we actually have a bunch of, we call them personas built into Norby. So you can switch it, for example, from a brainstorming assistant mode to a therapist to a companion. We have one staff member in our office that wants to put it in a venting mode, so basically Norby will just sit there and she'll complain about her boyfriend and it'll just agree with her. So we're getting people with all sorts of wacky -

>> Mental health is up and to the right.

Adrian Mullan

>> Yes.

>> What's your vision for steady state for you and your business, for future? Norby on everyone's desk? Norby on everyone's nightstand? Norby in every home? What would be your North Star vision?

Adrian Mullan

>> Yeah, effectively for us, we want Norby to live right next to the desktop. We are seeing a lot of activity at the moment in things like humanoids and that will increase. Realistically though, we've still got a little while to go before they become mainstream. And I think we'll live in a reality where people will have multiple devices under the one roof.

>> Yeah. I mean, to me, one of the biggest problem I have with my desktop is I have all these dongles connecting all the different machines I got. I got a Mac, I got a PC, I got my gaming station, then I got my chargers. So add a little external peripheral, you got my desktop. Adrian, thanks for coming on theCUBE.

Adrian Mullan

>> Thank you. It was great speaking to you.

>> Appreciate you. Final question, Cerebras, what's your take on Cerebras? Obviously their event here, what's your relationship with Cerebras? What do you think about their numbers?

Adrian Mullan

>> It's pretty impressive. Yeah, the team's been amazing to deal with. They've been really receptive to feedback and you'll hear a bunch of new announcements today in terms of new models, which is really good.

>> Thanks for coming on. Good luck. Looking forward to getting one.

Adrian Mullan

>> Thank you.

>> When can I get one?

Adrian Mullan

>> Pre-orders are available on the website now. Beta units shipping in the next few months, and then production units just before Thanksgiving.

>> All right, well, I need some therapy for sure. And then talk to someone to complain to. All right, I'm John Furrier here. Bringing all the action, the pop-up CUBE. We do whatever it takes. Cerebras Supernova event, turning into basically a conference. 2000 people, line out the door, super packed. Of course, theCUBE's here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.