@rrhoover@chrismessina beyond creating a good voice interface, I think what @yvesbehar and the team at Intuition Robotics have done well is define a compelling problem - how can you ease loneliness for aging adults who prefer to live by themselves?
With this lens, they've created a solution, which happens to be a robotic companion with a voice interface. Compared to similar products that were mostly tech explorations, ELLI•Q seeks to solve a real problem.
@kunalslab@rrhoover@yvesbehar would love to see the kind of user research that went into this. It's definitely a compelling use case — not without loads and loads of social design challenges!
@kunalslab@chrismessina@rrhoover@yvesbehar I'm also very curious to know about the user research here. I set my wife's grandmother up with a tablet so we could skype with her and drop photos on her screen remotely. It's something... but at the end of the day she wants to see *us*, not images/videos on a screen. Technology, in my one-time experience, did not fulfill the human desire for human interaction. :\
ALLLL the robots! This is one of the prettiest ones I've seen... Even though I feel like I'm going senile, according to my birth certificate I'm not. I wonder if "old at heart" qualifies for this kind of robot...?
Question for me is, how will this tackle the population of elderly with Dementia? I believe even this simple interface (which don't get me wrong, I really love the product idea!) would be confusing to people with Dementia. Any thoughts on that?
I want one of these... voice is bound to be big in 2017. Will be exciting to see if this finds fruition and it's path to market. I don't doubt it's ability, but demo videos are one thing, a finished product with that range of features is something completely different. Nevertheless excited for the ELLI•Q.