Amazon's AI chips find their way into Astro butler bot, latest wall-hanging display Amazon has created another custom chip to speed up artificial intelligence in its home electronics. On Tuesday the online souk and cloud computing giant introduced a bunch of new gadgets, including a robot and a wall-mount home-organizing computer, with AI hardware acceleration that can personalize the equipment to your daily …
I won't have anything Alexa related in the house - I just don't trust them.
And that goes double for a robot that will, once the novelty has worn off, end up (a) back in its box, or (b) in the cupboard under the stairs, or (c) dumped on some unsuspecting pensioner ("This'll help you through the day Gran"), or (d) set up in the back yard to be shot at.
Maybe in ten years the technology will be useful, so long as the reporting back/cloud computing/spying has been sorted out, but now it's simply not for me.
I don't think "dated" is the word you're looking for. I'd go with "better product designers".
Take the camera-on-wheels with its capability of carrying two kilograms of something. A perfectly useful method of retrieving items, is it not? Well, I think the science fiction writers have realized that such a device also needs an arm which can retrieve an item so it can be carried over, which this one just doesn't have. All this brings is a tiny motorized cart with limited range. You still have to have a person on both ends to move things in to and out of the thing, and I'm also guessing this moves slower than standard walking speed. So what good is that?
"It is loaded with AI hardware and software that fuses computer vision, autonomous navigation systems, and voice recognition into a box-on-wheels, we're told.""
Given the way Amazon treat their workforce, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this turned out to be loaded with a very small mechanical turk...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
