If you've become hostage to a clutch of remote controls in your living room,
never quite sure what all the buttons do and confusing different controllers
for different gadgets, then Toshiba might have the answer. It's developed a
prototype robot that can act as a voice gateway to just about anything in the
room that has a remote control.
The robot is called "ApriPoco" -- a name that mixes up the previous
robot's ApriAlpha moniker with the Italian "poco a poco" for "little
by little," which is the pace at which it learns commands from users, said
Daisuke Yamamoto, a research scientist at Toshiba's humancentric laboratory
here in Kawasaki, near Tokyo.
When activated in a room it watches for the infrared signals emitted by remote
controls and when it senses one it asks the user "What are you doing?"
From the voice reply, for example "Switching on the TV," it begins
to learn the meaning of each signal and eventually can imitate the remote control
when commanded by voice. So all it takes is to say "Switch on the TV"
and the set should spring to life.
The robot also has the ability to remember program names or genres but right
now can't match it up with an electronic program guide to, for example, find
which channel is broadcasting a news program in response to the command "news."
In a demonstration at the R&D lab in Kawasaki the ApriPoco was able to
switch on and off a TV, air conditioner and lamp in response to commands from
Yamamoto.
The user has to speak clearly and use simple language to stand a chance of
being understood. Toshiba's researchers liken the language required to something
like that of a mother speaking to a young child or baby and it's for that reason
that ApriPoco has been designed to look somewhat like a baby. It's 27 centimeters
tall and has a large round body with small fat wings that take the place of
arms, and large, round eyes.
At present the speech recognition system isn't inside ApriPoco. Half of the
robot's functions, including the voice recognition system, run in a laptop PC
that sits nearby but that will soon be built inside the next version of the
prototype device.
The ApriPoco project began in 2006 and the prototype robot shown on Monday
is the first public product from the work. Toshiba's robotics work goes back
further and ApriPoco's lineage can be traced back to the ApriAlpha project that
began in 2003. There are plenty of design similarities between the two robots
although the new prototype is much smaller.
Toshiba wants to develop the robot into a commercial product but more development
works needs to be done so at present there are no plans to put ApriPoco on sale.
Martyn Williams is Tokyo bureau chief for the IDG News
Service.
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If you've become hostage to a clutch of remote controls in your living room,
never quite sure what all the buttons do and confusing different controllers
for different gadgets, then Toshiba might have the answer. It's developed a
prototype robot that can act as a voice gateway to just about anything in the
room that has a remote control.
