If you are a robot dog lover, you must have watched the viral 2-minute demo video of the Boston Dynamics robot dog, where it speaks to Santiago Valdarrama and verbally answers the questions about its battery level and mission status. This video, recorded at Levatas' Lab, has hit the internet by storm. Additionally, you must be thrilled at the statement of Chris Nielson, the CEO and founder of Levatas, as he claims: “This robot dog will answer any of your question.” How amazing it feels to communicate with this four-legged yellow robot pet. This surely wouldn’t have been possible without the most advanced technology of the time – ChatGPT.
Yes, you heard that right. Levatas team is on its way to integrating the most advanced ChatGPT language model into its robot dog “Spot.” This robo-pup introduced in 2020 is just levelled up with ChatGPT's brain. Now it can answer any of your queries asked. Well, thanks to ChatGPT, which gives it a voice! Though these talking robot dogs by Boston Dynamics are in their research phase and have not released commercially, they have been one of the year's hot topics. If you want to know more about this ChatGPT-powered Boston Dynamics Robot Dog, watch out no further, as we have got you covered entirely.
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Spot Shifts from a Programmable Robot Dog to ChatGPT-powered Interactive Robot Dog
Spot, the Boston Dynamics Robot Dog, is basically a programming robot that was initially designed in collaboration with Levatas to accomplish several tasks or missions in manufacturing and logistics companies. This dog robot initially had an AI-powered cognitive inspection interface. It could perform several tasks on the factory sites like identifying analogue gauges, unauthorized people, radiation, and unsafe conditions in the workplace such as leakages and spillage etc. It could also perform thermal inspections and recurrent missions. During each mission, it walked around the area with a long list of tasks to check out. At the end of each round, it came across huge datasets of observations which were stored in its database.
This tons of captured data required technical persons to handle as it could not communicate its data to common people. Moreover, the users could just send orders to the programmable Spot via remote control, which again required technical expertise and seemed boring. This issue raised the need for a robotic dog who could interact with humans and deliver all the required information to even a non-technical person. Here comes ChatGPT, which has been a hot topic since its release and the developers have tested its power in numerous ways. Hence, relying on the power of ChatGPT, it was high time to convert Spot from a simple robot dog Boston Dynamics into a talking robot dog.
Finally, the team at Levatas found a way to understand the result of each mission accomplished by Spot easily. Thanks to ChatGPT! The Boston Dynamics Spot robot can now interpret and respond to your queries using natural language. You ask any question relevant to its mission or collected data, and it would communicate everything about that.
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How does Boston Dynamics Robot Dog Work?
Boston Dynamics ChatGPT-integrated Robot Dog works in two stages:
- Understands Your Questions Using ChatGPT, and then
- Responds to Queries vocally using Google’s Text-to-Speech AI
You can ask questions about any accomplished or upcoming task. And this combo of quadrupedal robot and generative AI promptly interprets the questions, analyzes its data files, formulates an answer, and verbally communicates it in real-time. You can ask this Boston Dynamics robot dog about its past and future missions and get answers. You can even show it mission results along with the configuration files and query your data from this interactive dog robot. ChatGPT uses the voice technology of Google Assistant to enable this robot dog to comprehend and answer humans face-to-face. Hence, the integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Text-to-speech feature gifted this yellow machine the power of speech.
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Benefits of Adding ChatGPT Brain to Boston Dynamics Robot Dog?
- ChatGPT Simplifies Interactions
Levatas – an industrial software company that has already been working with Boston Dynamics to enable robots with enhanced cognitive abilities, conducted several trials to give Spot a voice. It has incorporated ChatGPT brain to Spot robot and simplified everything for this Boston Dynamics Robot Dog and its controllers. No pre-programming is required now. As CEO and Founder at Levatas, Mr Chris Nielson says:
“We can cross reference information from different missions for the first time without pre-programming that capability. We give ChatGPT the raw data and instructions on interpreting it, and it answers the customer’s requests.”
The metallic good boy, Spot, with the ChatGPT feature, now leverages a natural voice interface instead of complex control panels. The natural voice interface integration has made Spot easier to manage its tasks. You don't need robotics training or technical expertise to talk to this ChatGPT-powered dog robot Boston Dynamics. Just ask any query in simple plain English, and it will respond to your queries in the same plain language.
Spot’s feature to nod its head in response to simple Yes/No type questions is very interesting and cute. Moreover, its expressions and body language is worth-watching.
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- ChatGPT Adds Safety Layer
The ChatGPT integration to Spot has enabled it to understand and respond to queries, making it much easier to handle now. If required, anyone in the facility can swiftly pause the robodog's autonomous mission. They just need to give this dog robot a simple command like “Holdup” or “Stop.” There is no need to wait for a technically expert single remote operator to stop it in an emergency.
As Nielson states:
“Not every employee is trained on how to work with or operate the robots. This kind of natural language command allows an everyday industrial worker to pause or stop the robot.”
- ChatGPT Can Assist Spot Save More Lives
A few months ago, Eric Adams, the NY City Mayor, publicized that the NYDP has planned to revive the practice of using robot dogs for hazardous tasks like inspecting harmful waste areas and some life-threatening missions, including hostages and bomb threats. Nielson foresees ChatGPT-powered Robot Dog by Boston Dynamics as a valuable use case for the mission. In an unfortunate situation, anyone can converse with this four-legged walking robot dog asking it to direct the location of some nearby emergency service facility.
Dreadful Concerns Associated with Boston Dynamics Robot Dog
Surely, Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog is a great development which seems cute and helpful to many people. This ChatGPT integration into Spot is a step towards bringing sci-fi into reality. Still, just like any other miraculous innovation, this development has left many people with the associated disastrous concerns. Some thought provokers believe such technological breakthroughs could lead to wild west consequences and foresee some dystopian future where such humanoid robots could turn against their creators. They consider dog robots a threat to humanity and perceive it as a possible move towards Black Mirror Dog– a horrible character portrayed in MetalHead – an episode of a famous TV series named Black Mirror. Another video shared by Sean Chiplock on Twitter, depicting a Russian firing a gun from a quadruped robot, encouraged the thought of a dystopian future posed by such robots. People are forced to consider such robot dogs as the end of civilization. To restate their worries, Valdarrama used Twitter and clarified all the negative thoughts about the ChatGPT-powered Boston Dynamics robot dog. He states:
“We are limiting ChatGPT to answer questions from a Context we generate. So, there is no way to get any other text. ChatGPT can’t control the robot at all. It’s just conversational.” “We do think about the ethics and safety. I promise you, pesticides on your food are about 100x more dangerous than this.”
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Wrap-Up
Since AI applications have already paved their way into several devices and have given legs and arms to advanced robots, this ChatGPT brain integration into Boston’s Spot is a milestone. With ChatGPT, which is well-versed in human-like command in the language, the development of an interactive dog robot was bound to happen. This yellow metallic pet is tons of fun and easy to control with the help of voice recognition. It can’t woof but speak to you. You can ask it any question, and this robot dog uses generative AI to answer. Though ChatGPT integration to Boston Dynamics robot dog is yet in its R&D phase, and Levatas has demonstrated its applications in the factory equipment inspections, we hope it would be a huge breakthrough in several sectors.