An AI robodog called “Spot” just levelled up, by getting ChatGPT inserted into its brain. Now, anyone can command the bot using normal language. Hopefully this special pet will be a very good boi.
The company that has been creating the dog robot is called Levatas. Levatas has integrated OpenAI’s Whisper into Boston Dynamics now-famous robodog to help with voice recognition. Whisper aims for perfect speech-to-text functionality. As a result, the metallic pet is now reportedly easier to control.
Now, Spot can do all sorts of jobs for companies.
AI robodog — employee of the month
So what are these upgraded robodogs going to be used for? Firstly, security. The robots have been tasked with patrol large warehouses or factories in order to detect unauthorised humans, which carries various levels of ethical murk with it. On a more positive note, they can also be sent into unsafe places like earthquake debris, or simply go to places humans don’t want to go, like warzones.
The robodogs can also check if physical things are working properly, and gather large amounts of information which can be fed back to base. Before ChatGPT, the data would have to be studied by highly technical people. Now, anyone can ask the robodog, using the ChatGPT brain, to tell them what the dog discovered.
The team is also working out how to make the robodogs do much more complex tasks. Using GPT-4, the next iteration of ChatGPT, they are trying to get the robodogs to solve problems without prompts from humans.
Machine learning expert Santiago says, “These robots run automated missions every day. Each mission uses miles-long, hard-to-understand configuration files. Only technical people can handle them. At the end of each mission, the robots capture a ton of data. There’s no simple way to query all of it on demand. That’s where ChatGPT comes in. We show it the configuration files and the mission results. We then ask questions using that context. Put that together with a voice-enabled interface, and we have an awesome way to query our data! We can now ask the robots about past and future missions and get an answer in real-time. ChatGPT interprets the question, parses the files, and formulates the answer. Massive upgrade!”
Surely this is a great development for the world. What could possibly go wrong?
