Robots could use Amazon’s artificial intelligence in the future to become full-fledged humanoids
If Amazon Alexa had two eyes and a body to go around the world it would be much smarter and could perform much more complex tasks. If Jeff Bezos’ digital assistant were a robot, it would basically be much more powerful and useful. This is not said by a fan of science fiction movies and literature, but by Rohit Prasad, an engineer at Amazon who works on Alexa’s machine learning algorithms.
Prasad, one of Amazon’s top scientists, spoke about a hypothetical Alexa robot at the EmTech Digital AI Conference organized in San Francisco by MIT Technology Review, making many think that, indeed, Amazon is working on such a project. A little less than a year ago Bloomberg had reported the news that the tech giant is actually working on a robot equipped with artificial intelligence, but Prasad did not confirm this hypothesis and limited himself to saying that “the only way to make smart assistants really smart is to give them eyes and let them explore the world.”
Robots equipped with artificial intelligence
Already today several devices that integrate Alexa are equipped with a camera and in the not too distant future will become many more, thanks to the growth of the smart home market. Even if a humanoid-bodied, brainy robot made by Amazon never sees the light of day, though, that doesn’t mean what Prasad said couldn’t make sense and have a future. It’s not an entirely science-fiction scenario that even though there are no AI-powered robots roaming our homes or the streets of our cities, we could see the birth of some sort of large “virtual body” for digital assistants.
Not just two eyes mounted on a walking robot, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fixed cameras that capture the real world and send tons of GBs of data in real time to Amazon’s servers that, thanks to this information, will be able to make smart assistants smarter. All this while millions more sensors (temperature, brightness, air quality) and microphones scattered around the world send more data to a single, large, centralized artificial brain. After all, what good is a body if the whole world is your body?
One answer to that question might be this: to work. In factories, in risky places, in caring for the elderly and disabled. The possible scenarios, then, are really more than one but only one thing is certain: Rohit Prasad, creator of Alexa’s brain, said that voice assistants need eyes and to explore the world.