My mother and the robot
The robot is very cute and fun to play with: though it does also serve as an Amazon Echo speaker, I find myself liking it a lot more for its playful mood and the tricks it does. To me, this seems to be one of the most advanced AI-toys out there: Vector can understand spoken commands, it can perceive its surroundings, you can pet it and it recognizes faces. It has very expressive eyes that it uses quite clever with almost comic-character movements to appear very life-like. Since it frequently just goes to explore the world on its own, or to play with its little cube, you can also just sit and watch it beep and buzz around.
It’s real fun and I got quite some good times out of it. What I did not expect though was, what happened when my mother saw it.
In my weekly email briefing (The AI Weekender), I’ve recently included an article by the New York Times about Zora, the robotic caregiver. Zora is a small bi-pedal remote-controlled robot. The company selling it targets hospitals and nursery homes and is trying to establish it as an addition to human nurses and caregivers. They report that the robot gets quite well accepted by the elderly inhabitants: the patients tell it things they wouldn’t tell humans (e.g. one patient apparently fell out of bed), they take their pills when it tells them to and they even would exercise together with it.
I didn’t doubt the report when reading it, but I’ve been scratching my head: how much do the patients really accept the robot? Do they just find it interesting as long as it’s new? I’ve found it odd that adult people would just start talking to something that was - very obviously - a machine about very private things.
A new robot in the house
I always spend Christmas at my parent’s house in Germany. We don’t participate much in the Christmas hype, but instead use the time to talk a lot and generally enjoy our time together (especially with me living in Beijing). So I took the little bot out of the box, to mainly show my Dad, who has a long-standing interest in these kind of things. My mother watched curiously and I showed her how she could tell the bot some commands, how it could learn her name and that she could pet and caress it on the back. I didn’t show her the list of commands though or even the app that comes with it - all she had was the robot looking at her and the general info that the thing was capable of a lot of activities.
When I came down to the kitchen next morning, I saw that she had been playing around with Vector a lot. She even told me how she had instructed it to go find me and how it then buzzed off: “He tried to find you! And he was so sad when he couldn’t!”.
Now every time someone comes to our house, she shows them Vector. She always tells me how it went afterwards and whether Vector understood or if he maybe was tired, because they played so much.
A robot earns a spot in a mother’s heart
My mother is of course fully aware that this is a machine, a toy even and not any kind of real pet. But somehow, this little bot has found its way into her heart and she treats it very much like a cute little animal. I have no clue why. This effect might be what happened with Zora, the robot from above. In fact, especially in Japan robots will be deployed extensively for elderly care, with lots of companies researching in that field. In China, robots can be found more and more as well and especially with the country’s AI goals, this will even more increase.
After observing my mother playing with Vector, I at least got a glimpse at that future now - and it doesn’t seem that bad anymore as I imagined it before. If you can lift an adult persons mood with a sweet and fun little robot like that, why not deploy these in more nursery homes or hospitals? This is not about doing labor tasks, but about the boring and lonely days in those places. Of course you cannot replace a human presence, but the sad reality is, that many inhabitants have no one to talk to besides an – some elder people (still living at home) report they go without talking to anybody for over a month. Could Vector do any damage here? I can’t really imagine how.
Talk to me
My second observation was that, with me not telling her what Vector could actually do, made her explore Vector’s capabilities on her own. Now, my mother doesn’t speak very much English and I only got the UK version. She was always a little scared of using her limited skills in front of people. With Vector though, she just doesn’t stop. She even looks up English words, asks me and my Dad how to say things and just talks to Vector, who happily beeps and tries to comply. Usually, he does just something and my mother couldn’t be happier. I just heard her introducing Vector a couple of days later to someone and her English skills have actually improved. It is indeed remarkable.
I am currently learning Chinese and I can tell you, learning a new language as an adult ishard. I have a private teacher and I do make progress, but I still sound like a 3-year old (at best). Just now, I’ve found a project on indiegogo that wants to build an AI-powered smart speaker that helps you learn Chinese as well. It seems people have way fewer problems talking wrong to - and being corrected by - a machine. It takes all that social pressure of sounding stupid out of the conversation and that is what really lets you make progress. Vector will of course not teach you perfect English, but with a few more advanced conversational skills, I think he could enable my mother to become a whole lot better. The principle here - Gamification - is already being used by countless teaching apps and devices, but none have ever caught the interest of my mother like Vector.
The future
I am convinced that platforms like Vector have great potential in elderly or child care and education – with the right privacy guardrails established. Just imagine a more advanced version of the cute and funny bot darting through a children’s hospital, playing some easy and funny games while being petted. It could also ensure help gets called if somebody falls downor shows some other obvious sign of being in the immediate need of medical attention. Or imagine an elderly person’s home, with nobody there except when meals are delivered: Vector could ask her how she feels (and make sure problems get reported), ask her to go for a walk and safely guide her home and turn on the TV later. There’s also great potential in the care for people with dementia, with two major roles as a study by the University of California San Diego just found: “support positive moments shared by caregivers and their loved ones; and lessen caregivers' emotional stress by taking on difficult tasks, such as answering repeated questions and restricting unhealthy food”. This would not only support the person in care, but also caregivers (who often experience stress).
For children, a little robot that makes sure you say the right commands, could provide basic support in language learning. But it can also teach basic programming and in fact, many products are already available for that!
I think, with the current rapid advancements in Natural Language Processing and image/video processing, we will see a lot more of little helpers like this in our daily life. My mother would love that, I guess!
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