Why Amazon would like to create some kind of Alexa humanoid robot

An Amazon engineer who spoke at the EmTech Digital AI conference on artificial intelligence said that Alexa could be much smarter and more useful if she had a robotic body and cameras that would allow her to evolve the real world. The idea is to teach Alexa to perform some tasks that require to understand a complex context for a machine, which nevertheless flows from source for humans.

Amazon could eventually develop a humanoid robot under Alexa, the personal assistant found at the moment mainly on the speakers Echo. Rohit Prasad, chief scientist and prominent member of the company's Alexa division, says that to help the assistant get a head start and become smarter, you need to give him a body and cameras and allow him to evolve. physically in the real world: "the only way to make intelligent assistants really intelligent and give them eyes and let them explore the world," he says.

Amazon again evokes the need for a robot to improve Alexa

Of course, many products equipped with Alexa already have cameras, but the solution he evokes will, according to The Verge, further, since it is to give him, ultimately, a robotic body. Rohit Prasad did not directly confirm that Amazon is actually working on such a robot. But the first rumors around an Alexa robot are at least 12 months old. And no doubt that this scientist, specialist in the transformation of natural language into machine language and other features around machine learning, would be one of the first Amazon to work around such a solution.

Personal assistants and artificial intelligence are still stumbling on major problems that matter their progress. It is notoriously difficult to get them to do tasks and respond to queries that we often find simple. The major problem raised by Rohit Prasad in this area is that of data acquisition. Many complex tasks performed by humans rely on a visual context and other important data that the brain considers as acquired.

One of the reasons is that this brain controls a body that evolves freely, and constantly acquires data about what is around us. Nevertheless, robotics itself may still have some progress to make. On the one hand, there are many kinds of robots that can move around and acquire data via cameras: we can talk about telepresence robots, robot vacuum cleaners, or autonomous cars. On the other hand, humanoid robots such as Atlas are still at their premise: they are extremely complex and expensive machines and can not realize at the moment essentially that pre-programmed tasks.