Sharjah24 – Reuters: Alphabet Inc's Google is combining the eyes and arms of physical robots with the intelligence and conversation skills of virtual chatbots to help its employees fetch soda and chips from breakrooms with ease.
The workplace waiters, shown in action to reporters last week, embody an artificial intelligence breakthrough that paves the way for multipurpose robots that are as easy to control as ones that perform a single, more structured task such as vacuuming or standing guard.
Google's system is not ready for sale. The robots perform only a few dozen simple actions, and the company has not yet embedded them with the "OK, Google" assistant functionality familiar to consumers.
While Google says it is pursuing development responsibly, concerns such as robots causing physical harm if they go awry or becoming tools for surveillance could ultimately stall their adoption. Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc are pursuing comparable research.
When asked to help clean a spill, Google's robot recognizes that grabbing a sponge is both a doable and more sensible response than apologizing for creating the mess.
The robots interpret naturally spoken commands, weigh possible actions against their capabilities and decide on a series of smaller steps to achieve the ask.
The chain is made possible by infusing the robots with language technology that draws understanding of the world from Wikipedia, social media and other webpages. Similar AI underlies chatbots or virtual assistants, but Google says the tech has not been before applied to robots this expansively.
Google unveiled the effort in a research paper in April. Since then, it incorporated more sophisticated language AI, boosting the robots' success rate on commands to 74% from 61%, according a company blog post on Tuesday.
Fellow Alphabet subsidiary Everyday Robots designs the robots, which for now will remain confined to grabbing snacks for employees.
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