Gadgetory

I hate robots but I think I'm changing my mind I'm Brian Cooley from seeing that in search of the next big thing humanoid style robots have been on the scene for quite a while at least a decade now give or take and so far they've had a market share and an importance that it's kind of down there with the Segway in the home 3d printer appealing mostly to geeks who are fascinated by the possible and not so concerned about the practical as a result we ended up with these things that are extremely humanoid trying almost too hard to be like mechanical people Honda's ASIMO dancing like your father or Toyotas robot playing a violin both amazed us but maybe didn't speak to a role in your home but now something's changing as we're seeing robot developers get more focused on relatability and usability not just technical ability LG just introduced a full line of robots that kind of have a face and an ability to communicate but notice no arms or excessively humanoid features and their smarts are powered by Amazon Alexa on the backend a bigger model is meant to be an airport employee who not only listens to you and helps you but also guides you where you may need to go it's also got a partner that is a janitor model the impact of that trend on employment is fascinating but beyond the scope of our show startup smart beings is developing a robot they have unfortunately named woohoo that you might think is just an Amazon echo with a screen but it has a rotating head so it's camera can look where its ears and microphones tell it the action is to better understand the scene and again be somewhat relatable it's envisioned as handling information communication to you updates whether things like that as well as integrating with your smart home for example as part of its function and note that it has facial and voice recognition plan an important part of allowing it to identify you as a individual not just as a human and may feel robotics sort of stole the show at CES with a robot called Curie that doesn't do much but be very relatable without arms legs a screen or even a voice it communicates with head and eye gestures as well as a series of blips and beeps sounds crazy I know but a lot of skeptics including me were kind of impressed by how much they've done to make those simple cues and gestures very understandable it too promises advanced facial recognition so it can better anticipate the needs of who it's looking at by knowing who it's looking at I think you can see now that the future of robots is shaping up to not necessarily be about their abilities that is likely going to be commodity but instead about their nuance and relatability as something that you have in your life but don't necessarily have to cater your life to and this will be based on three particular attributes that I'm seeing one of course is integration robots that are fully engaged in my preferences history calendar contacts all of the things that make everything smart in my life another is recognition as we've talked about the ability for a robot to understand Who I am based on my face and my voice it allows it to really dial in and serve me which leads to the big one anticipation we already have a lot of the functions that we're seeing in these robots in our phones and tablets but those are more tools than assistants because they have not taken the bar of anticipation and raised it that is the sweet spot for the coming robot know what's next at cnet.com / high and cool you