ASUS Zenbo Robot Will Control Your Home For You
A Wall.E style robot that can help around the home has been launched by Taiwan electronics firm Asus. Zenbo has a clean and sleek design, with a rounded base and a touchscreen display on top, that also doubles as its “face” when manipulating interacting with humans. This smart companion robot was created to fit in with Asus Chairman Jonney Shih’s ambition “to enable robotic computing for every household”. You only need one Zenbo per household and it can store data about each family member. The ASUS Zenbo has the ability to take pictures around the house on command. Assuming the Zenbo was not being remotely controlled from backstage, this was an impressive demonstration. There is no current release date for Zenbo, however it will be priced at $599 United States dollars. Asus is now seeking developers to work on software and other applications for the robot.
But Zenbo appears to be able to do quite a lot already. In Japan, the country struggling with an aging population, this could prove especially popular. No specified technical details is given by Asus nor have they given any availability details of the robot.
The manufacturer touts that children will be able to see the robot dance, or have a bedtime story read to them in a warm, robotic voice. Zenbo works similar to Amazon’s Echo, responding to voice queries and helping its owners logging into websites, inputting passwords, taking photos, and more. It can give answers to the questions through it’s built in voice system which sounds somewhat creepy but not as scary as some of the voice assistants.
“Hey Zenbo, who is smarter, Leonardo Da Vinci or Albert Einstein?”
Alike every other home device, the ZenBo can also connect and control your smart home and security devices.
ASUS hasn’t give much details on the device’s specs, intelligence system, processing power, or the like, but the Developer Program is now free to join.
Asus hasn’t offered any technical information on the robot at all, though chairman Jonney Shih did demonstrate a working model at a press conference in Taipei earlier today.
Join the CIO New Zealand newsletter!