Admit it, whenever you watch sci-fi movies and see all those AI creatures, you kinda wished you had one of your own to talk to and maybe even to order around. But even though you have voice-activated digital assistants on your smartphone like Siri or Hello Google, you can’t really have a running conversation with them. A new Indiegogo project called Musio will attempt to be the kind of robot friend that you need or want.
Musio is created by the natural language and machine learning company AKA, and their intention is to make learning more fun and interesting by having a robot help you. The more you use and talk to the robot, the more it will learn about you. Okay, that wasn’t meant to be scary, but rather, more useful as it is trained to “learn, adapt, and grow with you”. They had engineers, machine learning specialists, data scientists, and natural language processing linguists work on this project to come up with a product that aims to bring AI technology to a different level.
Not only can Musio speak naturally, it can also even share its emotions so that kids using it as a learning tool will be able to see it as more than just a robot trying to teach them things. It can also communicate through Bluetooth with devices surrounding it, as well as other objects so you can get it to perform simple tasks, like turning an appliance on or off. There are three kinds of Musio that you can order. The cheapest one is called Simple. and it can only remember 5 conversations and is not connected to the Internet. The Smart and Genius ones are connected and use BLE to communicate with other devices.
They still haven’t met their target of $50,000 to be able to produce a fully working Musio, but there are still 35 days to go. Simple costs $159, Smart is $299, while Genius is $599. For an additional $60, you can get a developer kit as well. For another $60, you can add-on a kids package that has books and flash cards. Visit their IndieGoGo page if you want to support them.
SOURCE: IndieGoGo
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