BlabDroids: ‘robots with personality’ ask questions

When you don’t want that human touch, a robot can be a wonderful replacement. For example, if you were interviewing someone and didn’t want the person behind the camera influencing the person in front of it.

That’s why the Blabdroid project started as a way to make a film but is evolving into something much more.

The cofounders, Brent Hoff and Alex Reben, wanted to make a camera that wouldn’t need to rely on a human to prompt discussion with a human subject. The results are familiar robotics technology, with playful elements, wheels and advanced controls.

They can’t respond to questions or interpret them at all, but they do record the answers they are given. Hoff, who also works at the Made In NY Media Center to help put together programming for the space, met with Technically Brooklyn to explain more about the bots.

• Each robot has about 16 to 20 questions loaded into it on a given outing.
• When people pick up a Blabdroid, or look at it, the device asks them an innocent question and records the human’s response.
• So far, they have recorded 190 hours in New York, 50 each in Miami and Los Angeles and 200 hours in Europe.

You can see a very small snippet of what they’ve gathered here:

They have found some interesting patterns. For example, as Hoff explained, one of the questions they have loaded into the robots asks who the person loves most in the world. People in Holland consistently say they love themselves, while New Yorkers say they love their mothers and people in Los Angeles won’t really answer the question.

People have been excited enough about the device that they have seen an opportunity to make a new version that they can sell. The new Blabdroid will have utility aspects to it, including Siri-like ability to answer questions about the time and the weather.

The real innovation of the new Blabdroid, though, will be the ability of owners to give the all the Blabdroids out in the world a question to ask. The user will be able to feed a question out into the cloud and it will randomly get asked by different Blabdroids everywhere. Then the person will see his or her answers and can opt whether or not to share the answers he or she gets back.

It’s like a crowdsourced, robotic answer to Mechanical Turk surveying.

Hoff explained that they want to let users keep control of as many aspects of the Blabdroid as possible. Blabdroids don’t automatically upload what they’ve recorded. Users have to attach them to the Internet and opt to do it. They can record metadata, such as location, but users can turn that off, too.

The system will be open and hackable. Users won’t have to share all the questions they get back (or any of them).

“These are basically dogs,” Hoff said, “They are tools.”

They just happen to be cute tools. The team has built about twenty bots. Two have been stolen. One was stolen by Robert de Niro at the Tribeca Film Festival, where the Blabdroid team said they were a part of one of the world’s first robot-shot documentaries. Hoff says the de Niro thing actually happened.

The Blabdroids team is looking for a developer to help create the broader online presence as the project expands. They are also seeking input on the project before going to crowdfunding. Give them feedback here.

While the Blabdroid and Toymail aren’t competing projects, we saw some interesting parallels in the idea of investing messaging systems with their own personality, and how that might change the sort of messages people sent.