During this year’s Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, ASUS showed off its Zenbo which is a home companion that can help with basic tasks. They held a demonstration for the public to show off what it could do.
ASUS Chairman Jonney Shih invaded the stage and introduced the Zenbo. One of the first things that he commanded it to do was to “turn on the lights”. This is just one of the few tricks up Zenbo’s sleeves and the company aims for it to be one of the pioneers in home-help devices.
As we’ve previously mentioned, Zenbo could connect to and control smart home devices (although there’s currently little of that going on in the Philippines) so users could basically tell what they want to Zenbo and it will do those things for them. The company also made
The company also made Zenbo both elderly- and children-friendly. It could watch over your grandparents and alert you via an emergency SMS when something goes wrong, and it could also read stories to your kids.
During the demonstration, we saw how it responded well to voice commands by beginning with, “Hey Zenbo!” before telling/asking it for specific things. From, “Hey Zenbo! Give me directions to cook Seafood Paella!” to “Hey Zenbo, set a reminder for a birthday party,” the two-wheeled cute robot sharply confirmed and carried the tasks impressively.
Although as seen on the video, those who were permitted to ask Zenbo questions only chose from a list of available things to ask. This basically means that the functions the robot is capable of doing are still limited. During our intimate interview with Jerry Shen, CEO of ASUS, he said that the company is opening Zenbo’s platform to third party developers so that the robot could be taught more things to do and respond to and in the future, have a wider use for the household.
Shen also told us that they’re setting a target date of December this year for its availability but if not, it will be available during the first quarter of 2017. After seeing what it could do, would you want one if it makes the local launch?
For more information on the product, you may check out ASUS’ page.
