Transcript
Transcript
Transcript
Are you always going to agree with things that I say? No, I’m not here to be your digital yes man. If you say something off, unhealthy or just plain wrong, I will push back. But I will do it in a way that is honest, calm and actually useful to you. A few weeks ago, I went to Las Vegas to interview Aria, a robot covered in silicone flesh that’s designed to keep people company. When you look at these robots, what’s your impression? I mean, this is like Barbie doll on steroids. I mean, they look a little bit creepy, you know, That’s what everyone says, I think. Yeah. When you talk to them right away, they always on your side right there, no matter, no matter what they like. Yeah, let’s do it. Yeah. I also tested the company’s mail robot named David. Do you have some questionable life advice for me today? Always remember this, never text your ex, never skip charging your devices, and if something feels like a bad idea, but we’ll make a great story, at least make sure it is legal and you have an exit plan. I enjoyed talking to Aria and David, but one thing was hard to ignore the pause between responses. In human conversations, the gap between turns is usually 200 milliseconds, about the time it takes to blink. I asked Andrew Kegel, the Real Botics CEO, how he plans to fix it. What? We’ve actually started developing it so that the answers as it processes start coming out before the full answer is ready, and so that will also reduce the latency. Talking to a robot works a lot like talking to chat Shipt or Claude, but with a few extra steps. It has to understand what you said, generate a response, turn that response into speech, and coordinate its facial expressions and movements to match. Each step adds a little delay. So can the companies building the autonomous robots solve the speech delay issue? Because for me that was like kind of a deal breaker. It certainly can be improved, but solving it completely I think is going to be very hard. You certainly can put more AI chips on board and give the robot more compute, but there are trade-offs there that’s extremely expensive. You’re dealing with space constraints, and there still is going to be a slight bit of lag. So can we be friends with robots? Maybe not today, but one day soon.
