Boston Dynamics’ robot dog can now speak thanks to AI

Boston Dynamics’ robot dog, Spot, can now speak thanks to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence models, the robotics company recently announced.

The company turned its four-legged trotting robot into a fully interactive tour guide equipped with multiple personas, including the “fancy butler,” a 1920s archaeologist, a teenager, a Shakespearean time traveler, and a sarcastic personality named Josh.

Making Chat (ro)Botsyoutu.be

Using ChatGPT and other large language models, Spot can now answer questions and plan actions.

“In this way, the LLM can be thought of as an improv actor—we provide a broad strokes script and the LLM fills in the blanks on the fly,” Boston Dynamics stated.

The company explained that the models often display “emergent behavior,” or “the ability to perform tasks outside of what they were directly trained on.” This ability allows LLMs to adapt to a variety of situations and applications.

The project team used “careful prompt engineering” to program Spot’s conversation skills.

When Spot does not know the answer to a question, it asks a human located at the company’s help desk. While the team did not program Spot to ask for help, the robot “drew the association between the location ‘IT help desk’ and the action of asking for help independently.”

When Spot was asked who its parents were, it brought the tour audience to the “old Spots” displayed in the office, explaining that the previous models were its “elders.”

Boston Dynamics noted that Spot’s emergent behavior does not suggest the robot is “conscious or even intelligent in a human sense—they just show the power of statistical association between the concepts of ‘help desk’ and ‘asking a question,’ and ‘parents’ with ‘old.’”

“We were also surprised at just how well the LLM was at staying ‘in character’ even as we gave it ever more absurd ‘personalities.’ We learned right away that ‘snarky’ or ‘sarcastic’ personalities worked really well; and we even got the robot to go on a ‘bigfoot hunt’ around the office, asking random passerby whether they’d seen any cryptids around,” the company reported.

A video posted by Boston Dynamics shows Spot giving a brief tour around the office.

“Shall we commence our journey?” Spot asks, using its “fancy butler” persona. “The charging stations, where Spot robots rest and recharge, is our first point of interest. Follow me, gentlemen.”

When asked whether it likes it job, Spot replies, “My employment as tour guide provides great satisfaction. I find the dissemination of knowledge rather rewarding, don’t you agree?”

Matt Klingensmith, the principal software engineer on the Spot project, explained, “We gave the robot a very brief script that is along the lines of, ‘here are the rooms,’ there’s just a list of names. And then for each room we have a sentence that says, ‘This is the charging station. It’s where robots go to recharge.’”

According to Klingensmith, Spot combines the room information list with imagery from its cameras, which it runs through a visual question-answering model, to respond to questions.

“It will caption what’s in the images around it, feed that in with the script that we gave it, and it comes up with a response,” he said.

Klingensmith stated that AI technologies will be helpful in many environments.

“It’s hard to know what kind of capabilities will even be available in the next few years. This kind of technology might make it possible for robots not just to follow our commands but, in some sense, understand the actions that they can take in the context of the world around them,” he added.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!