Boston Dynamics has taught its dog robot to talk using ChatGPT (video)
He already gives tours and recites haiku
We’ve seen the four-legged robot Spot running, jumping, and even dancing, but now it has learned to talk.
A video released by Boston Dynamics shows a dog robot wearing a top hat, with a mustache and bulging eyes, giving a tour of company facilities while speaking in a British accent.
“Shall we begin our journey?” asks Spot. “Charging stations, where Spot robots rest and recharge, are our first point. Let’s go, gentlemen.”
As shown in the demo, Spot is able to answer questions and even opens its mouth to make it seem like it’s actually talking.
Boston Dynamics used OpenAI’s ChatGPT API along with several other major open source language models to teach its robot to talk. Then we added a speaker and made the mouth move.
Matt Klingensmith, chief software engineer at Boston Dynamics, says the team provided Spot with a “very short script” for each room in the facility, which it combines with images from the cameras on the body. According to the company, Spot uses Visual Question Answering models to actually create descriptions for images and answer questions about them.
Spot went further and, at the request of the interlocutor, published a somewhat sad haiku:
“The generator is humming quietly in a room devoid of joy. Just like my soul.”
Boston Dynamics says it discovered a few surprises when it experimented with Spot as a tour guide. In one case, the robot responded to the question “who are your parents” by heading to the office where older Spot models are displayed.
At the same time, the big language model did not do without “hallucinations,” for example, by inventing that the Stretch robot was created for yoga (and not for moving boxes, as it was actually intended).
“We are excited to explore the combination of AI and robotics further. These models can provide cultural context, general knowledge, and flexibility that can be useful for many robotics tasks – for example, being able to assign a task to a robot by simply talking to it will help shorten the learning curve for using these systems,” Klingensmith said.
Although the robotic dog looks quite cute in the demonstration, the enhancement of its skills is somewhat alarming – especially given that they are in police service. At the same time, last year Boston Dynamics and 5 other companies promised not to use their robots as weapons.
