January sees the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kick off the tech year in Las Vegas, showing the world what exciting, crazy or insane technological ideas coming to our kitchens, homes, cars and offices in the near future. High on that list are robots and smart services of all types to help save us time, do more work for us and help us communicate better.
Perhaps acting as a concierge within our smart TV sets, fridges or smart gadgets, or working for banks and businesses as permanent assistants to help with our queries. They could also act as friends to people who don’t have time or local support. All we need is the push to holographic projection technology, which was shown in early forms, and these could be appearing in our banks and homes in full 3D, but for now, they look pretty convincing on any screen.
Everything about Neon works in real-time, using AI and to respond without delay, making the experience more natural. Of course, some people want a greater degree of physical interaction with their robots and the show has plenty to offer in the way of toys, helpers and gadgets.
From delivering toilet paper to those stranded on the loo (thanks, Charmin — he’s only a concept but I’m sure some large single-floor homes would welcome one) to acting as a cuddly companion, there is a droid for everyone.
Lovot (note how all these robot companies are using the ‘.life’ domain extension) from Japanese company Groove.X is one of the more interesting models, a range of emotional robots from China, they are soft and cuddly, rather than going for the hard plastic approach.
They use Emotional Robotics technology to stir and respond to people’s feelings, through the ways that the robots look, feel and behave.
Behind all these robots arehuge amounts of AI knowledge and cloud computing power, but you don’t need an expensive robot to bring that to your customers or their homes. Chatbots are fast-growing services through their AI prowess to deliver advice on social media, apps or websites.
They are helping save lives, delivering valuable advice and making it accessible to people who might not want to talk to another person about their problems. And any business can build a chatbot, you don’t need a factory full of scientists to churn out a quirky range of robots. Services like SnatchBot allow any business to build a chatbot to help with customer service, discussing charity or health issues with natural language processing and other AI features to keep up with in-crowd.
Naturally, people are worried about their privacy and security when it comes to sharing with robots or chatbots. Google announced big changes to its policies around Google Assistant and other bots at CES, with a big jump toward better protection for users and their data.
Back in the smart home, these technologies sort of floundered after the glut of smart lightbulbs, thermostats and cameras hit stores in recent years. Trying to regain the initiative is Plume which plans to use the wireless signals around our home to detect movement and activity rather than people having to fork out for those expensive (and easy to hack) cameras.
Smarter and more futuristic-looking cars are also a staple of CES, and this year is no exception with BMW showing its Avatar autonomous car, made to represent the world from James Cameron’s fresh update to the iconic movie.
From Sony comes the Vision-S concept electric car to highlight the massive amount of data and automotive sensors that are needed for these modern digital vehicles, it features 33 sensors, plus widescreen displays and a ‘360-Reality Audio’ system is included with each seat having its own speaker for infotainment via 5G for media, gaming and interaction.
Whatever the model, the actual road-going smart cars of the future will all feature bots to help manage the complex systems within and to get from A to B.
