ASUS says it’s not a toy, but a home helper. And it’s just embarrassing. When I was a child helping my parents, I jokingly called the spare pair of hands. At Zenbo no hands at all. So he won’t bring you a beer from the fridge, hold a towel in the bathroom and not open the door guests. However, stop! To open the door, he just knows. In any case, this was discussed in the official promotional video. However, this requires a smart lock that is connected to your home network. And he can conditionally look through the peephole, that is, take a picture with the camera at the front door to your screen. Again, this requires a camera included in a home network. In General, once you begin to think about how much you need Zenbo, it becomes unclear who is who in the end we have home helper.
And anyway, if you think about it from a functional point of view, Zenbo – no not a robot, but rather a mobile terminal, inferior functionality and even smartphone.
ASUS Zenbo at Computex 2016
Cheerful people we see in the official promotional video cleverly beat the typical situations in which a robot manifests itself good. Here the forgetful grandpa, which the robot recalls the medication, here is a daughter of preschool age, which requests his favorite song and trying on under her dress. But in the house the guests have arrived and the robot “opens” the door for them. All this is pretty darn cool, but in real life it’s different.
Again, to fix a dangerous situation (falling off the stool, for example), you should wear smart watch. No smart watch – no alarm – no help. That is, in this case, the robot is useless. To respond to the vibration of the floor and loud noises, apparently, he can’t.
Yet we are told that Zenbo recognize people by their faces, but this possibility has not yet been shown. And in my opinion it is not as necessary, such as the voice recognition, because people can easily go beyond the field of view of the robot, while remaining well audible. Judging by the fact that at the demonstration Zenbo react to the same query from different people, no recognition of it does not work at all. At least not yet.
ASUS Zenbo
But the main thing – we have no technical details. For example, screen resolution, who cares? But how long the robot runs out of battery? How fast it is charging? What speed can move? Of the features that were announced only the weight is 9 lbs. And cost $ 599.
So at the moment, Zenbo is more like a family pet or companion, and useless, though infinitely sweet, toy.