Wouldn’t it be cool if our voice assistant programs, like Google Now, Siri, or Cortana, be used to control more than just our smartphones? Sure, we’ve seen hacks where they can be used to control certain things around the house, but how about a robot? Well that’s what one developer and robotics expert by the name of Robert Oschler did.
He basically took a Windows Phone with Cortana, connected it to a commercially available robot from WowWee called RoboMe, and through a customized piece of software, allowed the user to give the robot commands using Cortana. The end result is a robot called Nanabot which not only combines the features of RoboMe, but also performs additional actions thanks to the use of Cortana.
According to Oschler, “Using advanced speech recognition and conversation techniques, Nanabot can play games with you, explore your house, guard your room, recognize book covers, and even deliver messages to other family members as they enter the room.” It seems more novel than functional, and as you can see in the video above, the reaction time is a bit slow.
Its creator has since launched an Indiegogo campaign where he is trying to raise money to sell his app. The app itself isn’t too pricey, but we guess the expensive part is where the user would have to actually buy WowWee’s RoboMe device for themselves. In any case if you’re intrigued and wouldn’t mind contributing to it, hit up its Indiegogo page for the details.
Filed in . Read more about Cortana, Crowdfunding, Indiegogo, Microsoft, Nokia and Windows Phone.