Here’s an interesting one. It’s a little robot called Jibo that can be your digital assistant. It’s fixed in one place but has a multitude of sensors to help it find out what’s happening in the world around it. It can see, hear and speak thanks to a couple of webcams, 360 degree microphones and natural language processing and can learn from the world around it to adapt to your daily patterns and actions. There are a couple of offerings that claim to do all this, but where Jibo is different is in that it communicates using moves and displays that are emotive and expressive to help make it more social and relatable. You can sign up to learn more at their website here: Jibo
In the meantime, if you want to learn more and figure out how to build for it, there’s an SDK available to figure out how to access Jibo’s motors, speech technology, facial recognition and tracking, touch input technology, and more. It also gives you an easy way to build Jibo Skills (robot applications) through animation and behavior editors. Check out the SDK at the Jibo Developer Portal.
In the meantime, check out this video showing how to use the SDK