Add a Robot to Your Desk

Think of it as being something like Siri, the artificial personal assistant for Apple cell phones, only with even more intelligence and then built into a toy robot that sits on your desk.

Robotalk connects to the Internet via your wi-fi wireless network, has a great deal of intelligence, and is controlled by voice commands. It also answers questions verbally. It can do at least all of the following:

• Greeting: Robotalk greets you if its camera or proximity sensors detect movement (the greeting can be anything you want, just set it up in advance).
• Online search: answers questions such as "what's new?" and "what time is it now?" by querying the internet.
• Scheduled alerts: mark important dates and times using Google Calendar, and Robotalk will dutifully remind you of them.
• News: Robotalk will read the news for you (you can set your favorite RSS feeds, regional weather, etc.), and if you specify a topic it will focus on that (e.g. sports).
• Photo and voice messaging: you can email photos taken with Robotalk's camera, and record 15-second personal messages or reminders.
• Chat: cures boredom with thousands of anecdotes, bits of trivia, news, and quizzes.
• Survey: set up to 10 questions and possible answers (or allow free-form answers that are recorded). The data is saved to an external USB drive and/or sent to an email address. Okamura suggests this feature could be used to conduct market research.
• Presentation: Robotalk gives a verbal presentation in your place (useful for marketing or product demonstrations).
• Music player: play MP3s and other audio formats from an external USB drive. It has the usual playback features including repeat, skip, and shuffle. I suspect it has very small speakers, however, so I am not expecting high fidelity sounds.
• Games: play Shiritori (a Japanese word game), get your daily horoscope, guessing game, Genius Quiz (based on a popular TV show with a variety of topics).

Other functions are being added frequently. Robotalk obviously can do all of this in Japanese but the article I read didn't mention if the same capability is available in English or not.

With a price tag of "only" $5,087 US, I don't think I will run out to buy one immediately. However, if I had a relative who was incapacitated, bed-ridden, or otherwise incapable of using a computer keyboard and mouse, I'd be strongly tempted to find the money someplace to improve the quality of his or her life a bit. A digital assistant could be very useful to invalids.

Details and a lot of pictures may be found at http://goo.gl/Fwlc4.