Anki’s Vector robot originally launched back in 2018. As a companion robot, it offered some pretty innovative features at the time including mobile app control, voice control, facial recognition and more.
Now Anki is promoting an upcoming Beta software release to Vector, which would see a new integration with today’s innovations, LLMs. Anki have selected ChatGPT as the vector for modern AI for Vector, allowing the small AI-powered home robot, to hear and respond to plain English.
Expect Vector’s conversational abilities to grow substantially by leveraging OpenAI’s language model.
You can see my original review of Vector from back in December 2018 on techAU here.
Vector was smart, monitoring its own state of charge and when he was running low, would roll over to his charger all on his own.
Vector was also Alexa-enabled and could interact with your home IoT products, with just a simple voice request, you could turn on your TV, turn off your lights, or open your garage door (via IFTTT) all by asking Vector.
This demonstrates the power of a connected robot and while most of our voice assistants in the home come in the form of a smart speaker, Vector is very different, as he’s mobile, making him far more versatile and easy to move between room.
Anki have confirmed the robot will soon go multi-lingual, allowing input/output form different languages. Given Australia is so multicultural and many people have English as a second language, this will be welcome news to many.
