Busy working works often demands some quick chips and sips. Taking a smoke break to satisfying one's food cravings, people nowadays spend a little time from their productive hours to settle down, gossip and refresh. Much needed too!
Caring for its employees, Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google is now combining the eyes and arms of physical robots with the knowledge and conversation skills of virtual chatbots to help its employees fetch soda and chips from breakrooms with ease.
Fellow Alphabet subsidiary Everyday Robots designs the robots, which for now will stay confined to grabbing snacks for employees. Google robots are not ready for sale, Reuters reported. It further revealed that the company has not yet embedded them with the "OK, Google" summoning feature familiar to consumers.
Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) are pursuing comparable research on robots. The robots interpret naturally spoken commands, weigh possible actions against their capabilities and plan smaller steps to achieve the ask.
When asked to help clean a spill, Google's robot recognizes that grabbing a sponge is a doable and more sensible response than apologizing for creating the mess. "It's going to take a while before we can really have a firm grasp on the direct commercial impact," Vincent Vanhoucke, senior director for Google's robotics research told Reuters.
