Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Smart Home
  3. News

Fribo is a cat-like robot that tells your friends what’s going on in your home

By
Fribo: A Robot for People Who Live Alone

Whether it’s Apple’s HomePod, Google’s Google Home or Amazon’s Echo, you can’t throw a rock in 2018 without hitting a tech giant that is jumping on the smart artificial intelligence assistant bandwagon. A new project created by roboticists in South Korea adds a slightly different twist to the smart speaker concept, however, through a constantly listening robot that is designed to help us stave off loneliness.

Recommended Videos

Called Fribo, the cat-looking robot device works by listening to the sounds in your home, and then figuring out what you are doing using A.I. Once it knows this, it will then pass this information on to friends in your social circle in the hopes that it triggers an interaction.

For example, if it hears you opening your fridge door, your buddy could receive a message alerting them to this fact, and pondering “which food your friend is going to have?” That may sound a bit creepy, but the hope is that these kinds of prompts could cause people to communicate more. (Even if we might personally feel a bit alarmed if a friend we hadn’t heard from for a while called up to ask why we’ve opened the fridge at 10 p.m. on a Friday night!)

“The primary function of Fribo is to share the daily activities to alleviate isolated feeling and loneliness that one experiences while living at home alone,” the researchers noted in a paper about the project.

Fribo isn’t the only example we’ve come across of smart assistants which aim to promote social interactions. Intuition Robotics’ ElliQ, for instance, is designed with the elderly in mind. Like a mix of the Amazon Echo and a robotic version of the animated Pixar mascot, ElliQ uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to both offer limited robo-companionship, and also to suggest that owners reach out to friends and family regularly.

At this stage, it’s not clear whether Fribo will make it to market. The researchers suggest a long-term study, which would test the technology on users around the world. While we’re not sure that this is a solution everyone would be happy with, we do think that the researchers are asking the right questions about the isolating effects of technology and modern life.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Luke Dormehl
Luke Dormehl
Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Clever new A.I. system promises to train your dog while you’re away from home
finding rover facial recognition app dog face big eyes

One of the few good things about lockdown and working from home has been having more time to spend with pets. But when the world returns to normal, people are going to go back to the office, and in some cases that means leaving dogs at home for a large part of the day, hopefully with someone coming into your house to let them out at the midday point.

What if it was possible for an A.I. device, like a next-generation Amazon Echo, to give your pooch a dog-training class while you were away? That’s the basis for a project carried out by researchers at Colorado State University. Initially spotted by Chris Stokel-Walker, author of YouTubers:How YouTube Shook Up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars, and reported by New Scientist, the work involves a prototype device that’s able to give out canine commands, check to see if they’re being obeyed, and then provide a treat as a reward when they are.

Read more
A disembodied robot mouth and 14 other 2020 stories we laughed at
The Prayer

Goodbye 2020, and good riddance! But before we slam the door shut on this tumultuous year, let’s try to raise a smile or two by revisiting some of the more amusing tech stories that landed on the pages of Digital Trends over the last 12 months. Here's a recap of the weirdest, wildest, and most hilariously strange stories we've run this year. Enjoy!
A.I. fail as robot TV camera follows bald head instead of soccer ball
https://twitter.com/rogbennett/status/1321869751258329090

While artificial intelligence (A.I.) has clearly made astonishing strides in recent years, the technology is still prone to the occasional fail.

Read more
MIT’s clever robotic basketball hoop will help you level up your game
MIT robot basketball hoop

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory might not seem like the folks most likely to help you improve your hoop-shooting basketball skills. But that’s exactly what a new MIT CSAIL project sets out to do with a quirky basketball-training machine featuring a basketball hoop that shrinks and raises when you make shots, thereby shape-shifting to help improve the various facets of your game.

For example, to begin with, the basket can be positioned at a lower height with wider hoop diameter, which gradually shrinks down and also raises to reach regulation proportions as you score more and more baskets. It’s an unusual project from a lab that’s more used to working with the latest cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms -- but, as it turns out, it fits perfectly with CSAIL’s areas of expertise.

Read more