Panasonic's companion robot is a cute projector trapped in an egg
But hey, it's a cute projector.
Have you ever wanted to talk to a projector? No? Well, Panasonic wants to change that. It's showing off a proof-of-concept desktop companion robot here at CES that can respond to commands to project images and videos on a wall or your desk.
The robot doesn't have a name, and it's really at CES just so Panasonic can get some feedback on whether this is something people want. As for the feature set, it's a connected device with speech recognition that Panasonic hopes will perform many of the functions that Amazon's Echo or Google's Home speakers can. You can ask it questions, engage in inane conversation and so on.
Of course, Echo and Home don't have a projector or wheels, and neither is particularly cute. Panasonic's robot has an almost childlike voice, and anthropomorphized movements to convey some level of emotion. It's able to wheel around on your desk and can project video from sources like YouTube and Netflix on your wall or, really, any flat surface.
There's no route to market for the bot, and it seemed like it was barely held together. It also crashed a few times during the demonstration, at one point projecting a terminal screen with errors on the wall behind it. But still, cute!
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