Olly - the robot with personality

by Startacus Admin

Olly is Emotech’s answer to Amazon’s Echo, styled as a robot with personality. Born from a London based robotics startup, Olly will respond to questions you ask it by looking them up for you, just like the Echo, and can also be used as a control hub for internet-connected products and smart devices in the home.

One of the things that sets Olly apart, however, is its ability to be proactive. The more it learns about you and your patterns, the more it will be able to predict what you might want from it. Make a pattern of asking the weather before you leave the house in the morning, and it will let you know you’re in for rain when it detects you getting ready to leave. If you like to listen to music when you get home, it will use what it knows about the kind of music you like to start playing it as soon as you come in the door. Olly can wake you up in the mornings and order a taxi for you while you get ready, whilst warning you of traffic congestion on your normal route, and putting out your cereal and tying your laces. We may be imagining the last bit...

(We'd love to show your their latest promo video - but we can only find it embedded on Facebook, so check it out here.)

Olly’s design is a fetching doughnut, which lies flat when at rest, and then sits up to interact with you, even swivelling a full 360 degrees to face you wherever you are. It houses a lot of LEDs to help it express itself, also making it more pleasant to look at. And to make it more pleasing to listen to, it has a range of voices and accents to choose from.

Olly’s deep learning will result in a more unique machine with its own personality, in a sense. Emotech say that, just as there are no two people alike, there are no two Ollys alike. This is because Olly learns from you and adapts to your personality, behaviour, and patterns. The Olly belonging to someone talkative will be a lot more conversational and engage people in conversation without prompting, while the Olly belonging to someone quieter might stay quiet until spoken to.

Backed with more than $10 million in Series A funding, Olly was named as CES Innovation Awards honoree in a landmark four categories back in November last year, and although not launched yet we are getting quite excited by the character that this little robot seems to demonstrate.

If Olly turns out the way it is being shown, we think it is a serious contender to Amazon’s Echo; perhaps even more. Just be careful it doesn’t fall in love with your spouse and try to remove you from the equation.

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• #ai
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• #olly robot
• #emotech
• #echo
• #amazon echo

Published on: 3rd September 2017