To us, it sounds like a waste of time, but SociBot-Mini is a new type of robot which can wear any face, guess your mood or your age and do other kinds of creepy stuff a metal head on a fixed stand can do. It’s a project by Will Jackson and some colleagues at UK’s Engineered Arts and it may soon hit Kickstarter.
The robot can recognize voices, track faces, do a bit of lip-syncing and handle speech synthesis in over twenty languages. The machine can hold simple conversations with people thanks to chatbot software based on a certain Rosette tool. Dying to tinker with it? You can buy it for £9500, or get its SociBot sibling at £14500.
The developers see it as the next step in human-to-machine interaction. Will Jackson tells New Scientist that user interfaces have seen very little progress since the typewriter. And that we have moved on to social internet and software, but not hardware with a more personal touch. The robot is being described as a futuristic information terminal.
But we don’t see why it would be so unnatural for someone to direct their queries to a screen-like interface and expect answers from it. We mean, isn’t that how Google Now and Siri are built? We’d rather be asking a screen for information than a creepy talking head.
Skype is interested in technology:
Socibot comes with a transparent plastic face and a backlit projector. It can present a generic face or take on the facial features of someone you recognize, like a friend or colleague. The technology may hit it off in the telecommuting space too.
Imagine the robot being connected via software to your phone, you get a call and the head lights up displaying the face of the person trying to reach you. A similar robot called Furhat is being developed by Samer Al Moubayed of Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology.
Skype will be collaborating with Al Moubayed to take the robot donning 3D-printed face masks and all, to the Interspeech conference in Singapore this September.
