Alphabet adds AI language skills to helper robots

The helper robots will be programmed to understand natural language commands

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is collaborating on two of its most ambitious research projects-AI, language understanding and robotics to make a helper robot. The helper robot will be programmed to understand natural language commands. According to The Verge, Alphabet has been developing robots that can perform simple tasks like fetching drinks and cleaning surfaces since 2019. This Everyday Robots project is still in its infancy; the robots are slow and hesitant. The bots have now been upgraded: improved language understanding courtesy of Google's large language model (LLM) PaLM. Most robots only respond to short and simple instructions, like "bring me a bottle of water." But LLMs like GPT-3 and Google's MuM can better parse the intent behind more oblique commands.

In Google's example, you might tell one of the Everyday Robots prototypes, "I spilled my drink. Can you help?" The robot filters this instruction through an internal list of possible actions and interprets it as "fetch me the sponge from the kitchen". Google said that by integrating PaLM-SayCan into its robots, the bots could plan correct responses to 101 user-instructions 84 percent of the time and successfully execute them 74 percent of the time.