“I am ifbot. Hello.”
Various robots appeared in demonstrations at a conference.
One of them was this “ifbot.”
It was actually on display at Expo 2005 Aichi in the Brother Industries pavilion.
But at the expo there were always overwhelming numbers of people, and it was hard to get a proper look.
In this kind of specialized setting, you can interact with the robot one-on-one, and I got about 15 minutes of detailed explanation.
A pretty good experience.
The original concept for this robot was a companion for young children, but recently the focus has shifted more toward preventing cognitive decline in elderly people.
The robot does voice recognition, but its responses come from a pre-built library rather than being learned — it doesn’t adapt through machine learning.
Given how many phrases it knew, there must have been an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work to build that database.