Boston Dynamics Turns Its Spot Robot Into a Tour Guide With ChatGPT
Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Boston Dynamics is back with another video, only there's no parkour and dancing. This time, Spot the robot dog is the star, and now he has the power of speech and personality thanks to some help from ChatGPT.
Mixing ChatGPT and robots with the power to open doors and fight off a hockey stick might seem like a bad idea at first glance (and second and third...), but Boston Dynamic's latest demonstration is nonetheless impressive. The team gave Spot a speaker, microphone, and ChatGPT API access to build personality and the ability to interact. For fun, they also taught Spot to use its gripper arm as a puppet-like mouth and added fun hats and googly eyes.
To get started, the team wrote a basic script for each room, such as introducing the charging stations where the robots dock. Then, it added the ability for Spot to take pictures of the rooms, ask questions about what it can see, and make new captions. Finally, it gave ChatGPT some basic prompts to create personalities, such as a British tour guide, a traveling Shakespeare, a teenage girl, and a sarcastic Josh.
The results are, as often is the case with ChatGPT, unexpected. Spot can offer compliments, create poetry on the fly, and even answer questions that aren't in the script. That last bit led to a surprising moment: when the team asked Spot to show them its parents, the robot led them to a display of older-generation Spot robots.
The results aren't always perfect, naturally. Thanks to ChatGPT, Spot occasionally made stuff up on the fly that wasn't true. When one team member asked Spot a question mid-tour, the robot initially ignored the question and continued its script before coming back with an answer. But despite those
Read more on pcmag.com
