The Shape of Robots to Come
By MICHEL MARRIOTT | NYT
A segmented tower on a metal and plastic base swiveled around. Two glowing segments, suggesting a head, tilted forward and spoke: “Hello. My name is Scoty. Let me explain a few things about myself.”
In a vaguely female synthesized voice — but always in plain English — Scoty, the latest robot from the robotic-toy makerWowWee, demonstrated its functions for a visitor recently.
Chief among them are managing a personal computer’s communication and entertainment abilities, finding and playing songs by voice request, recording television shows, telling users when they have e-mail and, again by voice request, reading the e-mail aloud. It takes and then sends voice-to-text e-mail dictation. It takes pictures, and gives the time when asked.
Scoty, pronounced Scotty, has no keyboard and does not require mastery of any specialized computer languages to nudge it to perform and reply in a likeable human manner, its makers said.
While its name stands for smart companion operating technology, “Scoty is more of a companion than operating technologies,” said Richard Yanofsky, president of WowWee, which is based in Hong Kong. For lack of a better term, he said, Scoty, which is 24 inches tall, is a “digital maid.”
As robots increasingly migrate from heavy industrial tasks, like welding automobile chassis on assembly lines, to home uses as restless toys and venturesome vacuum cleaners, a fetching personality and appealing appearance become critically important. A flashy show called “Robots: The Interactive Exhibition” is touring museums and science centers in the United States through 2012 with the aim of demystifying robotics, especially their harder edges…
Read the rest at the NYT
Posted Sat Mar 18th, 2006
