Future of Rolling Assistants: Temi

Now that the Kuri assistant has failed, will there soon be more smart speakers with cameras on wheels to come at our command, mix drinks and fetch our slippers?    At the recent IFA show in Berlin, a new one emerges called Temi. Impressive by its description below.   Inclined to think that the electro-mechanical needs of such a device make it too expensive for broad smart home application.  The Kuri's price pushed it beyond the easy trial realm for a new kind of home device.  What will it take?

Temi is your personal robot butler, like an Amazon Echo Show on wheels  By Simon Hill  in DigitalTech (includes a good demo video)

While popular culture has consistently served up a vision of the future that features robot servants at our beck and call, they’ve been slow to infiltrate our homes so far. Despite the development of increasingly sophisticated robotics and artificial intelligence, domestic robots have yet to take off.

Temi could be in the vanguard of a new wave of robot butlers designed to cater to our whims, or it could be a glorified smart speaker on wheels. We took it for a spin at IFA in Berlin to find out exactly what it’s capable of.

Standing just over 3 feet high, Temi has an Android tablet for a head, with a 10.1-inch screen. Behind that and a little lower there’s a kind of shelf that also works as a wireless charging pad for phones. The main body is curved with a couple of midrange speakers in the chest area and then a subwoofer built into the base.

There’s a lot of clever tech inside Temi.

There’s a lot of clever tech inside Temi. Cameras, sensors, microphones, and more enable it to hear you and track your movements, tilting its head up and down and turning around. Temi can also navigate around using lidar to detect and avoid any obstacles. Tap it on the head or ask it, and it will track and follow you around, turning as you do to ensure that it’s always facing you.

You can use a range of voice commands with Temi. Just like any other voice assistant it can answer basic questions, tell you about the weather, and play music and video. There’s support for a few major apps such as Google, Reddit, YouTube, CNN, Yelp, Deezer, and Uber, but because Temi runs a modified version of Android, developers have to add support. ... "