Generative AI and Personal Robots

The idea of humans and robots living and working together has existed for a long time. It’s been a central feature of many science fiction books, movies and TV shows. In these depictions, robots are not only able to communicate with people in natural ways, but also adapt to social customs and behaviors. This poses a great technological challenge, but the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT has propelled us forward in making this dream a reality. Now, we can generate contextually relevant, human-sounding text on demand and in almost any situation. As a result, our interactions with robots can be far richer and more fulfilling.

Pioneering social robots of the past like Kismet (MIT), Wakamaru (Mitsubishi), Jibo and others made great leaps in displaying emotion, verbal and nonverbal communication and relationship development. Today's LLMs enable us to make huge improvements in both general conversation and user personalization. We can effectively engage with and learn about our user and parse through tons of subjective data to form a deep understanding of their opinions, preferences and routines. This would complete a key piece of the puzzle of embedding robots into our everyday lives, making them truly personal, and this is what we are working on at Alongside.

Another benefit of integrating AI into personal robots is that it widens the scope of possible interactions. Robots of the past proved to be effective emotional companions. They were successfully perceived by users as friendly social agents and not simply machines, creating an intrinsic bond. However, work and creativity-focused applications have yet to be extensively explored and LLMs provide an opportunity to do so. OpenAI calls GPT a reasoning engine, not just a knowledge database. We can leverage this to create an adaptive understanding of someone’s work and turn these companions into powerful assistants and coworkers. Working alone has its limitations, and personal robots could collaborate with us to ideate, work through complex problems and build creative habits.

Conversation: LLMs provide a great baseline for conversation. A model like GPT can have an intelligent conversation over just about anything. They also let us more easily create optimized conversation experiences for specific functions. Generative Speech Models have also improved the quality and realism of artificial voices.

Personalization and Customization: Generative AI lets us create rich personalities for our robots, give them a deep backstory, and adapt them to new contexts. Being able to easily modify our use of LLMs based on user input lets users meaningfully customize their personal sidekick.

Capabilities: Using Generative AI, personal robots can meaningfully interact with a user's existing data and browse the internet. This unlocks a world of new functionality in our work lives.

Proactivity: One of the core promises of the social robot is proactivity. Your robot shouldn’t always have to wait for you to trigger it with a keyword. It should possess the awareness required to proactively engage you in conversation, creating a two-way relationship.