Interactive robot has own personality

Robots have come a long way in being useful and capable in people’s everyday lives, but the goal of creating something that seems completely natural to interact with has remained elusive. One company called Emotech is designing its Olly robot to address this challenge by allowing interactions to shape the product’s personality. Olly is billed as a “smart lifestyle assistant” that modifies its tonality based on personal interests and how the user interacts with it. For visual cues, Olly displays a large, animated eyeball on a screen. The company has a former Dreamworks animator on board, so the goal is to make a cute household helper rather than something that reminds people of J.R.R. Tolkien's Eye of Sauron in "The Lord of the Rings."

Olly will have a crowdfunding campaign by early 2016. In many ways, the robot is similar to devices such as the Amazon Echo. It can be used as a smart home hub and users can talk to it to play music or look up specific information. Olly also has a “smart scheduling” feature that helps people manage their time.

Users can also set goals. According to TechCrunch, the objective is that if a user says he or she wants to read a certain number of books in a month, Olly will recommend reading time when it thinks the person has some free time.

Increasingly, the most practical robots in the real world are proving to be learning software embedded in various form factors, humanoid or not. Software has demonstrated the most important part of the modern robot experience, as can be seen with the integration of voice assistants such as Siri into smartphones. Yet the package these things come in is important as well. This is where hardware makers have an ability to stand out. Emotech would not have hired a Dreamworks animator if it did not care about how people were physically interacting and responding to the product. In China, some manufacturers are already designing intelligent, interactive robots such as this one from Shenzhen Corfu Technology.