Apple’s Next Nebulous Idea: Smart Home Robots

Humanoid robots are one of those dreams that sometimes feels like we’re on the verge of realizing. Boston Dynamics has its Atlas robot and Tesla is betting on robotics, while companies like Mercedes, Amazon and BMW are or will test robots for industrial use. But all these robots are very expensive, performing tasks in controlled environments. At home, they may still be far away.

Enter Apple. Mark Gurman in Bloomberg he said Its robotics projects are under the responsibility of former Google employee John Giannandrea, who was responsible for Siri and, for a time, the Apple Car. With the car project cancelled, Vision Pro launched and “Apple Intelligence” arriving, is that the next big thing?

According to your information, any humanoid robot from Apple is at least a decade away. Still, simpler ideas might be closer — a smaller robot that can follow you around, or another idea involving a big iPad screen on a robotic arm that emotes along with the caller on the other end of the line with head nods and stuff. of the genre.

However, a mobile robot is complicated; what the hell would Apple do to do with a domestic robot that follows me? Are you going to play music? Will it have wheels or will it walk? Will I be expected to talk to AJAX or SiriGPT or whatever the company calls its chatbot? Or, given Apple’s supposed OpenAI deal, some other chatbot?

Indeed, what form will it take? Will it fly? Will it have wheels? Will it be a ball? I can kick?

Your shape will be at least as important as your intelligence. Houses have stairs, furniture that sometimes moves, clothes that end up on the floor, pets that get in the way, and children who leave their things behind. everywhere. Doors that opened or closed perfectly yesterday don’t do so today because it rained. A random kitchen remodel 20 years ago could mean that your refrigerator door hits the corner of the wall near the stairs, because why would you put refrigerator space anywhere else, David? But I disagree.

Based on the few details that have emerged, Apple’s robotics ideas seem to fit into the trend of charming innovative bots we’ve been seeing lately.

A recent example is Samsung Practical bot concept, which looks like a robot vacuum cleaner with a rod at the top and a single articulated arm, designed to perform tasks such as picking up things or sorting dishes. There’s also the cute Ballie robot, which Samsung showed off at some CES shows. The latest iteration follows its humans and comes with a projector that can be used for movies, video calls, or entertaining the family dog.

Meanwhile, Amazon $1,600 home robot with tablet on his face, Astro, is still available by invitation only. It’s charming, with a chic late-’90s Compaq computer aesthetic, but it’s unclear whether it’s functionally more useful than some cheap wired cameras and an Echo Dot.

LG says is Q9 “AI Agent”It’s a traveling smart home controller that can guess your mood and play music for you based on how you’re feeling. I’m very skeptical about all of this, but it has a handle and I love a piece of technology with a built-in handle.

I still want a sci-fi future filled with robotic home assistants that save us from the mundane tasks that keep us from the fun things we’d rather do. But we do not all live in the spotless and orderly abode presented in the Samsung Ballie Video or the videos Apple produces showing its hardware in personal spaces. Many normal homes are dens of robot-confounding chaos, which tech companies will have a hard time accounting for when they create robots designed to follow us around or perform tasks autonomously.

There are other paths to follow. Grab the Ring Always Home Cam, which will be very noisy judging by the demo videos, but it can also be useful and even good. Setting aside the not-insignificant privacy implications for a moment, it looks promising to me mainly because of the mobility and because it was only designed to be a patrol security camera.

This kind of focused functionality means it’s predictable, and that’s what makes single-use devices and accessories work. After some experimentation, my smart speakers are where they consistently hear me or are most useful, and I can place my robotic vacuums in rooms that I know I’ll keep clean enough that they won’t get stuck or break something (usually).

The robot vacuums I have – the Eufy Robovac L35 and a Roomba j7 – do a good job, but sometimes they need rescuing when they find my cat’s sticky toys or eat a paper clip (which are somehow always on the floor, although I never, ever really need one or even know where we keep them).

I have a child, you know, and paving the way for them in other parts of the house is just adding more work to the mix. That’s fine with me because the two rooms they’re responsible for are the ones that need to be vacuumed the most, so they’re still solving a problem, but it nods to the broader hurdles robotic products face.

And it’s not so clear whether AI can solve these problems. A New York Times opinion article recently pointed out that despite all the hand-wringing over the technology over the past year and a half, generative AI has not proven that it will be any better at creating text, images, and music than the “mediocre vacuum robot that does an acceptable job.” ”

Given the generative AI boom and rumors that Apple is working on a HomePod with screena cheerful, stationary smart display that obsequiously turns the screen to face me at all times it seems at least vaguely within the company’s wheelhouse. Moving around indoors and interacting with objects is a trickier problem, but companies like Google and Toyota have found success using generative AI training approaches for robots that “learn” how to do things like make breakfast or quickly sort items. with little or no explicit programming. .

It will be years, maybe even decades, before Apple or anyone else can bring us something other than clunky, half-useful robots that stumble into our homes, being weird, frustrating, or broken. Heck, the phone companies haven’t even figured out how to do notifications yet, other than the bane of our collective existence. They have a tough job in homes like mine, where we’re just a busy week away from piles of junk piling up like snowdrifts, ready to ruin some poor robot’s day.