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Loading ...Wanted: Robot assistant
Alex Watson
Now that I have a blog to keep up to date, along with editing Features for both the magazine and the website, I am finding myself pretty busy at work. While I should probably just spend less time checking my RSS feeds, I did briefly consider getting a temporary assistant and trying to sneak it through on expenses. Human assistants are a bit passe though - in Japan, I would have been able to get myself a robot assistant.
The Pink Tentacle blog has a post up today with news that “People Staff, a major temporary staffing agency based in Nagoya, [has] announced it has accepted 10 of [Mitsubishi Wakamaru] robots as dispatch workers and is ready to send them out to work at businesses and institutions in the Tokai area of central Japan.”
Wakamaru is an awesome piece of kit - not only is it giant and yellow and named after a samurai, it has facial recognition software and can learn your daily routine, so that he can, according to Mitsubishi, “wake you up and remind you of your engagements.” You can even connect it to via your mobile and use its camera eyes to check out what it’s up to.
There are some great stories about it in the wonderful Loving the Machine book by Timothy Hornyak (and on his blog, too), and Mitsubishi also maintains a great English website about the ‘bot here.
The only downside is that while Wakamaru recognises 10,000 words, they’re all Japanese, so I would have to brush up my language skills to have any hope of a helpful robot assistant…
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