For those of you that are not familiar, Toyota isn’t just a car company they also develop robots. The latest one is a palm size companion that converses with you like a normal person.
According to Toyota Kirobo Mini 10 cm (4 in) high is designed to be your companion and it is going on sale in Japan next year. Toyota claims that it can with ease talk with you about your trips, for instance, based off the data it gathered from your vehicle. It also has child-like attributes which are highly disputed by robotics expert who told BBC that a robot in no mean could be a substitute for a child.
Fuminori Kataoka, Kirobo Mini’s chief design engineer, stated for Reuters news agency: “He wobbles a bit, and this is meant to emulate a seated baby, which hasn’t fully developed the skills to balance itself.” According to him, that is supposed to provoke a feeling of its owner and possibly a deeper connection. Prof Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, from the school of computer science at the University of Hertfordshire, said that the cute inventions like this might appeal only to the young ones. Furthermore, she stated for BBC that Kirobo Mini “reminded me of the Tamagotchi – the idea of having a cute little thing that is not necessarily giving you the impression that it is alive but has these lifelike attributes.”
Toyota against all of this still holds to claims that Kirobo Mini is “appealing to people’s nurturing instincts” but Prof Dautenhahn explained that it even might be “offensive” to think it could be a substitute for a child to a woman that has none. Toyota invested a lot in a commercial showing a woman holding and carrying this robot but they do not stand by that claim specifically.
They (Toyota) say that Kirobo Mini can engage in “casual conversation,” using gestures, facial expressions, and blinking; remember user preferences and previous events, such as likes, dislikes, and outings; use data from connected devices such as those in the home or car to generate comments. Toyota set the pricing of Kirobo Mini at 39,800 yen (£300) which is far less than other companion robots like Aldebaran’s humanoid robot, Pepper, which had a price tag of 198,000 yen. Kirobo Mini isn’t planned for sales out of Japan, at least for now, and it is a good thing to mention that its bigger brother Kirobo (34 cm tall) went to International Space Station in 2013 to follow Japanese astronaut Kochi Wakata as a part of research about isolation.
