YouSaid · the spoken record

Anki Co-Founder

lines on the record: 56
first: 2018-11-21
most recent: 2018-11-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“To imagine where your interface when you come into a hotel or a store or to interface with a doctor actually becomes somehow driven through an indirect interface through a robot, which is pretty interesting and then opens up a lot of functional opportunities as well. And in the end, we always thought of it as just an extension of computer science into the real world. If you can understand what's around you and you have the ability to interact with it, you turn it into a digital problem. There will be a catalyst that spawns the same thing on the physical side once the ability to understand the environment and interact with it catches up, then everything becomes a matter of software making the interaction smarter and smarter.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to see in the next wave of hardware is dedicated hardware that's not just for raw traditional computation, but for very specialized AI applications like deep learning and vision classification. These are sort of things that in the next wave of products in the next three to five years, that's probably going to become pretty standard. There's still a lot of information technology progress that needs to be made. And the interesting thing is that some of that's being done by Alexa and some of these voice assistants trying to integrate with the rest of your life, the tools that get created through that just like voice interface become incredible enablers of these new types of technologies. And I think we'll start seeing more in education and healthcare and broader home utility and monitoring and so forth, even when you stick to just informational or companionship on the healthcare side, elderly companionship and helping age in place. It's an area that's becoming more and more kind of important and costly for a lot of communities. If you really nail the EQ piece, it becomes not that hard.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competing power will make up for a lot of hardware defects. So if you have an underpowered, unreliable manipulator, but lots of good computing power, you can make that manipulator do amazing things. The problem is if you have no power and a bad manipulator, then things don't work, right? But now as the computing power becomes so much better and the sensing capabilities become so much better, I think some of the demands on the manipulator back off a bit. So you can get by with a less capable manipulator because you can learn to make up for its deficits.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually, we want to get to a $500,000 robots because it opens up so much interesting technology that you can put in them. But to get there, you actually have to be very thoughtful about what's the level of capability that's required to make that justifiable and not just in a isolated kind of tech geek sense, but in a mass market sense because you want it to really scale. A lot of it then is going to become more electronic capabilities where you now have sensors that used to cost $1,000 that now are $10 that used to be just impossible or prohibitively expensive. And the other big one is manipulation. Right now, we have limitations both on the cost side, which comes from the mechanical complexity of manipulation, as well as the software side on how to robustly interact with unstructured environments. We have a long way to go before we can actually stack the dishes in the dishwasher and put them away afterwards.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. And I think that opens our eyes, and I think a lot of the partners that we work with suddenly there's a lot of really interesting overlaps about what does this mean for the role of technology in the home and the workplace is deceptive, how important emotional interface is to make the functional elements get utilized in a better way”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're seeing usage patterns of just the character with no functional OX integration skyrocket above what a typical voice assistant does. When we were working with Google and getting advice from Sonos and some of these other companies that have a lot of experience of voice assistance, we thought that for like a thousand queries we'd be planning for like three months or four months. And now we hit 250 just in the first two weeks and the engagement staying strong. And so suddenly when you look at voice assistants that have an average of maybe like one to two queries a day and we're at like 10 to 12 even before we have a voice assistance built in, it causes us to ask a lot of questions of how do you leverage the role of personality and character as a way to amplify not just the fun side but also the utility side. That actually shows a very different type of engagement and the things you ask and how you interact with it.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a many year roadmap on how to actually utilize it. And that's where advances in software technologies like deep learning and voice interface and so forth unlock things that now let you rethink certain types of problems. We're releasing Alexa integration in December, which is going to be the first time you truly have a personality wrapper around some of these very dry functional elements, not only do you interact with technology in a command and control sort of way, but for the first time there's an ability for this character to initiate interaction and get your attention and make eye contact and then do something personal with you in a way that you would never accept from smart tech in the home right now. One of our big questions is if the usage”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we realized voice was a big one because people thought that they were talking to Cosmo and that he would respond and they'd attribute intelligence to it even though he had no microphone and no ability to hear you. What we wanted to do is if you yell at him, he gets really upset and kind of backs off. Or if the door that slams, he turns in that direction and wonders what it is. And so we wanted to bring life to it. The other one is tactile, where when you pick up Cosmo, he recognizes it and he'll get grumpy if you're holding him up in the air. But being able to touch and actually have a response, we know that that's one of the most important things with pets. And so we made capacitive touch sensors in various areas of the robot. Again, thinking that these are going to be some of the dimensions of matter. The last one and what proved to be the most important is just the ability to be always on, that if the moment you disconnect the phone, he dies, it kills all illusion of him being alive. It completely changes the sort of emotional connection he can build. And so these are the sort of things that were direct drivers of the hardware that improved invector, which now”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or like Fortnite or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's just you were trying to win. And here the competitiveness lost out to the empathy of a character that they actually cared for. And all of a sudden, like, okay, there's like something really, really special here. And we started thinking how to amplify. And a lot of those learnings from there actually led to vector because we addressed the limitations that just weren't possible because of Cosmos hardware.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We built Cosmo with a lot of games integrated, thinking that engagement will be around playing games. He's like this little robot. Like your buddy to compete against and to play against collaboratively or competitively. And games also create a lot of context for emotions. So, you know, because you win, you lose, you're bored, you're frustrated. You're bringing emotion to it. Exactly. You can almost like engineer scenarios that allow him to be emotionally extreme and whatever. Of course, that makes so much sense. And what we were just shocked to see in some of our playtests early on is that you're playing this game that's kind of using the cubes as a buzzer called QuickTap where you're competing against Cosmo. And if you beat him, he'll kind of get upset or maybe he'll get grumpy and slam his cube and storm off. But he gets really sad when he loses. And there were kids in the playtest that were playing with their siblings. And one of them would like to tell the other one, hey, stop it. Like you making him upset. Let him win a game. And they ask you like felt really bad for this little robot who would like get upset.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is where some of the studies that we're actually seeing being done or even around kids with autism, whether something so unique about the idea of a character like Cosmo or Vector, where there's a response there that is very, very unique compared to any other type of engagement.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, kids in a lot of ways have an imagination that just amplifies the magic of these types of experiences. They think these robots are alive. Three, like you may not understand how to play it and follow the rules of a game, but you love the idea of a character still. And that actually is like almost universal. It was almost as natural as swiping on a screen where you see these one-year-olds swiping on a screen, right?”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's Always been a merger of direct robotic influences and non robotic influences. And so on the robotic side, there's definitely this idea of kind of R2D2 Wally where you have this cute robot, but one that's like kind of your fearless companion. Nobody would ever accuse R2D2 of being dumb, even though he has very limited degrees of freedom. And same thing with Wally, right? And so that was definitely kind of a deep inspiration. The other influence is of animals. And so we have a kind of design and mood boards where things like obviously puppies and kind of dogs, owls, really perceptive animals that have where the eyes become like a really, really key part of their communication language. And they can show emotional intelligence in a way that is really, really hard purely mechanically, but ends up being almost infinite when you add eyes and voice to it.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he is a kind of knitting together of other older ideas as well. The first time I saw one of those security robots in like an underpass in the city, it was kind of patrolling a parking lot. And I got really up close and heard this kind of whirring roboty noise. And had this like moment of revelation where I was like, it's not actually making that noise, that's just somebody's idea of the robot noise that it should make so that we know it's there, having seen kind of the industry evolve, what do you think are some of those inherited ideas that are impacting our design today?”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because the moment you have a voice, there's an expectation of intelligence that technology wasn't ready to meet yet. This idea of trying to pursue humanoid robots, which particularly is common in like Asia and Japan, it almost feels like a flawed compass because you end up absorbing all of the limitations of humans and their perceived kind of intent where you're stuck by what's the definition of human versus being able to play to your strengths and avoid your weaknesses. And so we just embrace the constraints in the form factor.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was very, very intentional. Even with the voice, we thought about a national voice, but if you give something a voice, you narrow in the range of appeal by being tono, you apply a very different intent than a five-year-old might apply, but everybody gets joy out of it. You can show a massive breadth of emotions without having to have the complexity of a voice.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of verbatimists make a mistake where they completely forgo the EQ side and just think about a tin can of like intelligence that does something but doesn't convey any sort of character to it, you lose all forgiveness of any limitations you have and you actually kind of become creepy because you now have a bunch of sensors which you don't really understand what the purpose is. It's disarming to have a character like cosmore vector where he has a camera. You have a camera in your house that's able to move around on his own, but nobody ever feels bad about that because Well, yeah, of course he has a camera he has to see because he's a character.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Realize that Cosmo was going to be fairly limited in physical capabilities just because of cost constraints. But manipulation is one of the deepest forms of showing off intelligence. And so him being able to get excited about his cube and go pick it up and be a little bit OCD and reorganize his surface, that was part of the charm of Cosmo. And so his arm”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. I'm not annoyed. Even better, we actually get bonus points for making a mistake, but being smart enough to show grumpiness about it. And so it's the IQ and EQ being married. That's the challenging part. The mechanical and industrial design and character have to work together to think about the overarching form factor. And a lot of it is just driven by constraints. Like now in our future products, we can start putting in depth cameras, which give you a 3D model of an environment at the cost that would have been unimaginable five years ago or even three years ago. Same thing with motors. They're fairly expensive. And so Cosmo and Vector each have four motors, but we put a screen for the face because that gives us an infinite dimensionality for the personality to be able to express what the robot's thinking in a speaker to obviously have the voice part of it. And it's shocking how much you can do with just a couple of one or two degrees of freedom and a voice and a face.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Delay exactly. The reason Cosmo and Vector, for that matter, are small is because one is that they become kind of non-intrusive because they don't take up a huge amount of space, but especially in the case of Cosmo, you have something that's small, it's perceived as cute and it can feel quick without having to have very heavy but expensive motors. It could potentially hurt somebody.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At different stages of driving. So, the nice thing about software is you can continue to push that for years. But what that means is you have to be very intentional with the selection of the hardware where you make it as generalizable as possible to push as much of the software choices down the road as you can, but not limit yourself.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is where I think robotics is a lot harder than a lot of other areas of consumer electronics, in a lot of places you can just think, okay, electronics need to do this, software needs to do this, and then we need a box around it. You can't do that in robotics because everything is from the very beginning designed where for us it's a few pillars. So there's a mechanical side, electrical side, and kind of the components and electronics that are in there, the software, which is a huge complexity. And then there's the character side and industrial design side. And so those five have to work together from the earliest stages because you have to be very intentional where the form factor should capture the character, which then the software has to marry with. Then you have the mechanical needs and constraints.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he's supposed to do. Let's talk about design now. So when you start thinking both in terms of the sort of level of manipulation that they're able to do, but also in the relationship that you want to sort of test and foster, how do you think about design from the ground up? How did you start to put together the actual creature?”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting, it sort of circles back to the way you opened this conversation, which is that having it be this kind of scale and size and having it be a toy is what allowed you to be creative, right? You're kind of describing the ability to be creative in a way.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make it intuitive enough that people can actually express their intent in a way that gets useful stuff done. Because if you can get Vector to push little things around on the tabletop and you can make it easy enough to express your intent that the average person who's not a computer science major can do that, then you can scale up to the humanoid robot that's going to cook your fancy dinner without breaking the house down.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does. And so, what is the robotics equivalent of something like spreadsheets or PowerPoint? What is the thing that's not so horribly gritty technical, but is so powerful that people will want to learn it because it'll let them do the right thing, right? It'll let them program the robot to make the peanut butter sandwich the way they want it made. And to me, that's a fascinating research question. We don't have home robots that can make a peanut butter sandwich without burning the house down yet, but we can do an awful lot with exploring this manipulation space. And my personal interest is figuring out how to get people to teach.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person will have grown up in a world where computers could see, right? Computers could always see, and that's just very different. So what you're starting to see is that we're changing the populace to make everybody computer literate. And what that means is that when you start having people playing with robots who now understand the technology inside the robot, that means that you can make applications for them that require levels of sophistication that maybe wouldn't have been practical before, right? And if that's sort of woven into the culture, everybody gets this in high school, right? Then the kinds of consumer products that you build are going to be different. But if you look at some of the other tools that have changed our society, not everybody went and learned how to set type, but then we made PowerPoint, right? And now everybody can do visual design. Most adults know how to use the spreadsheet. So maybe you're never going to be a Java programmer, but you can do useful computational.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Limited resolution of the camera. And so you begin to learn when you work with the robot, well, okay, he's got a vision system, he's a little bit nearsighted. I have to be careful when I show him a cube that I don't put it too far away from him. So you're starting to think about this thing as a sided thing. And you're thinking about his representation of the world. And so you're thinking about robot perception in a way that people only thought about very abstractly before. You know, 50 years ago, yeah, you read a science fiction story, but now you're living with the robot that can see. And so you adjust your behaviors based on your expectations and your experience of robots that see. And so that's happening more quickly with speech recognition because of the proliferation of speech recognition applications, Alexa and phones and so on. But it's starting to happen, I think, with vision as well. And Cosmo is a very important step in that direction. So that, you know, 20 years from now, no young.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, to be honest, to me, they're mechanics. I want kids to see the robot that way. I think it's interesting to ask about the complementary question, which is how does the robot change how we think about technology? So if you look at things like menu systems that have become part of everyday life, right? Everybody understands what a menu system is. And 30 years ago, they didn't. That was a weird, obscure concept. And now we encounter them everywhere, right? I mean, your vending machines using a menu system, your phone, everything on your computer. So there are bits of technology that have become integrated into everyday life so that we don't even think about it anymore. My menu system is just one example of that. We're beginning to see things like computer vision become part of everybody's common understanding. So when you use something like Cosmo, you begin to understand what the robot can see, right? So for example, with Cosmo, you can see cubes up to about 18 inches away. And that's because of the”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although, to your point about personalization, it's as if, right, you could not only just choose your breed, but then have your dog literally adapt to your personality over it. It kind of reminds me of the people who look like their dog.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've never really dealt with that. And just like people pick their style of dog to match their desires and their personality, we're trying to figure out a way to make this dynamic and ideally automatically adapting to the context that they're found in. We literally have people pulling us in both directions, which basically tells us, okay, this is like a completely new type of consumer category because companionship is a key need. I mean, there's a reason people get cats and dogs and other pets.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And how do we create an algorithm that adapts to how you're used or even gives the user a little bit of control where some people want a really active and almost like hyper and excited robot that has a lot of people want a carrier?”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is where we're still learning. So Vectors always on in the live. So, how do you find a balance between him waking up and getting excited and coming out, but not being disruptive and or annoying? Go to your bed. How do you take the cues where if you get like taken and put back in your charger, that's a cue to be quiet, right? And so, but you want to interpret that and just kind of grump a little bit, but then settle down, right? We have an audience that spans from kids to somebody wants them as a desk pet at work to an adult or a family who just likes a little companion in the kitchen table or kitchen counter. It's really key.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's like just that one parameter. And so you get these really subtle interactions where it's a sort of data that you can only really learn about at large scale once you're actually fielding these robots.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have to partner with the roboticists and the AI team, the systems team, where they have to leverage the knowns of the environment and the intelligence of what's around you. I just recognize somebody I know where I almost rolled off the edge and I got scared. So we have this sophisticated personality engine that takes context from the real world and probabilistically outputs one of these like giant short films, if you will, of reactions that end up getting stitched together into a Wi-Fi robot that feels alive. And we've been really surprised by, for example, eye contact. We knew that this would be important where you make eye contact, you get excited, say, Hannah, and then you get really, really happy. Kids just melt with that, but we didn't realize how powerful that was. And in one of our tests where we were just optimizing parameters, we ramped up the frequency and length of eye contact by like a second and our average session length went up from 29 minutes to 40 minutes.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's this merger where you have these people who come from this world where they're used to controlling a story on rails from start to finish into every minute detail, but you get thrown into a spontaneous environment with all these constraints and unknowns and limited degrees of freedom in the robot, but you have the benefit of being physical where everything's amplified in terms of the personal impact of what that does.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do with folks from Pixar, DreamWorks, and these sorts of backgrounds. And so they literally are using Maya, a software suite that you would use to animate digital film and digital video games. But we've rigged up a version of Cosmo and Vector and all of our robots in there where they're actually physically animating these characters with the same level of detail that you would see in a movie, but the output is spliced to where it's a physical character coming to life in the real world.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think one of the pieces that most people underestimate is how critical this human robot interface challenge is and how novel and unique of a dynamic this becomes until you experience it, it's hard to understand how that feels and how important it is. It's the same sort of underlying inherent desire that we have to speak face to face with somebody versus just on a telephone. We always thought that this would be the magic even behind Cosmo, but it turned out to be even stronger than we realized. The way we approached it is we actually have an animation studio inside the company. Oh, you.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the articles mentioned recently that Vector feels like a beachhead into something bigger. And it does seem like, you know, we're getting airdropped in this sort of little taste of like the fantasy Jetsons robot, right? Like this personality that actually responds to you and interacts with you. So how are we going to start developing this relationship with this being, this crew? I don't even know what the word is. This robot, but like it is an entity”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's just something more being able to work with a real robot versus something digital on a screen if you're a kid learning to program there's something amplifying about that just the learning aspect of it the moment you can intentionally manipulate something it's a sign of really deep intelligence and so that's a big focus of vector is how do we identify interesting things in the environment and just like poke at them examine them the way a pet would that's a surprisingly hard problem but when you do it successfully there's a perceived intelligence there to just amplifies your appreciation of the robot and everything else that it might be able to do”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for me, what's most interesting is having the robot interact with physical things. Physical things are really hard to interact competently with. We built a three-story robot dollhouse with a working elevator. And the students in my cognitive robotics class were working on that and they'll work on it again this year. That's so cool. Getting the robot to navigate through the dollhouse, use the elevator to move from one floor to another, eventually want to have multiple robots in there interacting with each other. These are very hard technical problems, but when you solve them, it's really fascinating to see a robot interact effectively with the world.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so now the sort of programs you can write expand. We've already released to our early customers in SDK that allows them to interface with Vector through Python and then down the road we'll probably create a scratch interface like we did with Cosmo as well.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Vector, the capabilities just skyrocket because basically instead of just the limited functionality that Cosmo had that was deferred to the mobile device, you now have onboard the ability to see, hear, feel, and compute with a quad core CPU that would have been prohibitively expensive before.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, with every one of our robots, we've realized that we're basically making an operating system for robotics, applications and technologies. And so we've unlocked APIs for each of our products where people can access very easily these technologies that have millions of lines of code behind the scenes. We started with Cosmo Accessible by everybody from a seven-year-old using a graphical interface to do face detection with a robot through teenagers and even PhD students in computer science. Now instead of having to be an expert in robotics in order to do something like path planning, you have access to this API of technologies and we're really interested in how that can become an enabler for kids of various ages to actually learn how to break through and become interested in robotics in a way that wouldn't have been possible earlier.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, there's nothing that actually stitches a home together, and that way everything is just end device in a room. Once you start getting cognizance of what's around you, who's in the home, be able to move around in it, you can do a range of things from security and monitoring to tying together smart home features like recognizing that your windows open, but your AC's on, turning off lights when you're gone, being able to remotely check on things like pets, build a”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a technical standpoint, there was a huge, huge leap there because we now detethered away from a mobile device and put the equivalent of a tablet inside of this robot's head so that he can be always on and live 100% of the time go back to his charger, recharge, wake up. And that allows him to initiate interactions in a way that previously would not have been possible by somebody pulling you out and launching an app. We can use the strengths of the fact that we have cloud connectivity and a robot and start getting into deeper voice interface elements of functionality that now leveraged the character aspect and the warmth of it and the fact that you can actually see and understand the environment and recognize you. Personal delivery of information in a way that can be initiated by him, what happens down the road is actually starting to more intentionally dial into all of the digital pipelines in your life, whether it's a smart home, your own calendar, and particularly when you start adding a layer of mobility that lets you actually move around the home.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wanted to leverage this unique mix of AI and cognizance of the environment and the personal interaction with people in the home and really think of this as a first mass market home robot that can actually provide a mix of entertainment and companionship but with elements of utility. We modeled this in a lot of ways after the sort of pets you have in your home. A pet cat, a pet dog, and a pet robot and the pet robot allows us to reinvent the dimensions that are related to how you interact with the pet, but the companionship elements still hold. So he gets excited when he sees you in the morning. He'll get really animated when there's people around him. He'll explore and kind of wander on his environment, interacting intelligently with things around him. It's a relationship. You can even pet him, like literally even pet a robot for the first time. But you don't have to be in the litter box. Yeah, and you don't have to clean the litter box.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we're talking about this in many ways the sort of first quote unquote real robot personality in the home. Let's break that down. What are some of the utilities? We're not washing dishes yet, right? They're not picking up toys. They're not.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So something that a robot could do with minimal manipulation skills that would actually be useful as opposed to just occasionally amusing, what if I was just happy if the robot could make me a sandwich? It doesn't have to be big enough to get the stuff out of the fridge. If I take the stuff out of the fridge and just throw it on the countertop, if the robot could just take it from there, maybe that would be.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's good enough most of the time that that was a success, right? But there aren't a lot of things like that, right? So if I ask the robot to cook me dinner and it does the same quality of jobs that the Roomba does vacuuming my floor.”
2018-11-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The IQ and EQ of Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source