Hope you are well, and having a great weekend. Lots happening in the world of Technology, and I appreciate the comments from many of you readers who reached out to me after my EV post recently, about affordable Electric Vehicles.
Back to this week – and in the news, you’ve guessed it… Tesla were in the news again! This time, people who try to unlock their car from their phone – were unable to! issues with the app… You see, If I am travelling further than 20mins from my home, I’ll carry the key card with me. Because, let’s be honest – I trust alot of tech – but when it comes to the car – and a phone – it’s usually safer to carry the key card, because you just never know! (It’s all working now by the way!!)
Now to my Top Two Tech Stories of the week…
- First up… Imagine a Robot pouring your drinks!
You got it – when you go to a pub or bar, if the staff are friendly and helpful it very much adds to your enjoyment of the experience.
By contrast, having to deal with a surly person serving up your pint or margarita it risks significantly reducing your happiness levels.
For people with a regular drinking establishment of choice, the person behind the bar can even become a friend and confidant. Or, as renowned Canadian economist, Harry Gordon Johnson once said: “The greatest accomplishment of a bartender lies in his ability to exactly suit his customer.”
Soon, however, those bar staff might not even be human. Enter Cecilia, a robotic bartender that mixes and serves cocktails, and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to talk to customers in much the same way that Alexa, on an Amazon Echo speaker, or Siri, on an iPhone can respond to you.
The unit looks a bit like a tall fruit machine, only with an animated female barmaid – Cecilia – appearing on a large, upright video screen. You either tell her what cocktail you want, or order it on the below touch-screen, and pay for the drink by tapping your bank card or phone.
Your cocktail is then mixed and made inside the machine, and dispensed into a glass at the vending slot.
“Cecilia works on voice recognition and AI technology,” says Elad Kobi, chief executive of the Israeli firm behind the technology – Cecilia.AI. “She can chat to customers, and when they choose a specific cocktail, she can make it, live.”
The company says that each unit can be filled with 70 litres of different types of spirits, and that it can serve up to 120 cocktails per hour. At least if customers don’t stay for extended chats.
The firm first released the robot on 24 February of this year – World Bartender Day. Since then it has already been used at corporate events held by Microsoft, accountancy group KPMG, and tech firm Cisco.
Customers can either buy a Cecilia for $45,000 (£34,000), or hire one for $2,000 a month.
Mr Kobi believes that the traditionally change-resistant pubs and bars sector may increasingly turn to such technology in a bid to “wow” customers, and to stand out from the crowd.
Now… several years ago, I worked in partnership with Middlesex University to develop such a robot. We had some success – the sticking point for us was opening a glass bottle of coke. However, back then, when I was leading Innovation, it was brilliant to have a robot pour the perfect drink. The cost was another major hinderance – to have this in many bars. But glad to see you can hire one for $2,000 a month!
2. Sticking to Robots, Alphabet using Robots to clean up!
What does Google’s parent company Alphabet want with robots? Well, it would like them to clean up around the office, for a start.
The company announced today that its Everyday Robots Project — a team within its experimental X labs dedicated to creating “a general-purpose learning robot” — has moved some of its prototype machines out of the lab and into Google’s Bay Area campuses to carry out some light custodial tasks.
“We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices,” said Everyday Robot’s chief robot officer Hans Peter Brøndmo in a blog post. “The same robot that sorts trash can now be equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and use the same gripper that grasps cups can learn to open doors.”
These robots in question are essentially arms on wheels, with a multipurpose gripper on the end of a flexible arm attached to a central tower. There’s a “head” on top of the tower with cameras and sensors for machine vision and what looks like a spinning lidar unit on the side, presumably for navigation.
As Brøndmo indicates, these bots were first seen sorting out recycling when Alphabet debuted the Everyday Robot team in 2019. The big promise that’s being made by the company (as well as by many other startups and rivals) is that machine learning will finally enable robots to operate in “unstructured” environments like homes and offices.
Right now, we’re very good at building machines that can carry out repetitive jobs in a factory, but we’re stumped when trying to get them to replicate simple tasks like cleaning up a kitchen or folding laundry.
Think about it: you may have seen robots from Boston Dynamics performing backflips and dancing to The Rolling Stones, but have you ever seen one take out the trash? It’s because getting a machine to manipulate never-before-seen objects in a novel setting (something humans do every day) is extremely difficult. This is the problem Alphabet wants to solve.
So there you go… my Top Two Tech Stories of the week… all about Robots. Are they really taking over…..?