News By Russell Holly Jul. 16, 2014 3:17 pm
Somewhere along the way, tech companies figured out that natural language digital assistants were a cool way to add value to their products. As a result, we have Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and others to interact with. Someone has decided to figure out what happens if you take that disembodied voice from your phone and move it to a robot whose only job is to help your family out. This little robot is named Jibo, and it has the potential to be very cool.
Tech geeks the world over have been playing with voice controls for a while now. If you’ve got the right hardware, you can do some incredibly cool things with the tech. Unfortunately, most of those cool things are totally separate from one another. You can tell your TV to change the channel, you can tell your phone to turn down the lights, and you can even tell your smartwatch to order some pizza, but none of this is connected and none of these things are aware of one another. Jibo feels like an attempt to be an adorable little JARVIS that sits in your house and helps in any way possible, with a special focus on being user friendly to an entire family instead of a single user.
The Jibo website explains that this tiny robot is built with two color stereo cameras and an HD touchscreen for a face. This robot can tether to the wall or run on batteries, so it can stay in the living room, or come along to events. The software is more than a little undefined at the moment, but the demo during the presentation video showed off services like email, SMS, Eat24, and some interactive reading apps. The cameras seem capable of video chat that allows the user on the other end to control things like head tracking, which would obviously mean it doesn’t play well with current video chat platforms.
As first impressions go, Jibo looks very nice but doesn’t do nearly enough to explain how it would fit into the life of an already connected home. The company is relying on Indiegogo as a shopping cart for its*little robot, with developer units shipping in September and consumer units shipping in December. Hopefully there’s a lot more in the way of demonstrations from the Jibo team before launch to show off everything this little robot is capable of.
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Tech geeks the world over have been playing with voice controls for a while now. If you’ve got the right hardware, you can do some incredibly cool things with the tech. Unfortunately, most of those cool things are totally separate from one another. You can tell your TV to change the channel, you can tell your phone to turn down the lights, and you can even tell your smartwatch to order some pizza, but none of this is connected and none of these things are aware of one another. Jibo feels like an attempt to be an adorable little JARVIS that sits in your house and helps in any way possible, with a special focus on being user friendly to an entire family instead of a single user.
The Jibo website explains that this tiny robot is built with two color stereo cameras and an HD touchscreen for a face. This robot can tether to the wall or run on batteries, so it can stay in the living room, or come along to events. The software is more than a little undefined at the moment, but the demo during the presentation video showed off services like email, SMS, Eat24, and some interactive reading apps. The cameras seem capable of video chat that allows the user on the other end to control things like head tracking, which would obviously mean it doesn’t play well with current video chat platforms.
As first impressions go, Jibo looks very nice but doesn’t do nearly enough to explain how it would fit into the life of an already connected home. The company is relying on Indiegogo as a shopping cart for its*little robot, with developer units shipping in September and consumer units shipping in December. Hopefully there’s a lot more in the way of demonstrations from the Jibo team before launch to show off everything this little robot is capable of.
More...
