Cleopatra the Electronic Home Attendant

junger writes "Electronic home attendant Cleopatra is a digital avatar that appears on screens and wireless tablets throughout ElectronicHouse's 2006 Home of the Year. She greets each resident in the home by name, announces visitors, phone calls, voice mails, emails and deliveries. Cleopatra shows who is home, pictures of recent visitors at the front door, the local weather forecast, stock market changes, and even the national security level."

Re:bah

[Red Flayer]

Have you looked into butler service? Regular maintenance on the damn thing is a bitch. Plus unexpected downtime for random reasons, susceptibility to viruses and worms (though the latter is very rare).

Wait, am I talking about a butler or Cleopatra on Windows?

Seriously, though, butler service is damn expensive. A good full-time butler easily makes 50-70 grand a year (often much more), plus health insurance, etc. And they are unionizing, so you'll be looking at having to pay someone else to do the laundry or light maintenance. Even a butler service will cost you a bunch though the butlers tend to be not quite as good -- often in training, or relatively inexperienced. The nice thing is that you'll have someone even when your primary is on vacation, and have an easy option for extra staff for events or multiple staff for extended hours.

My point is that over the course of a just a year or two, Cleo (including installation) will be cheaper than a full-time butler. Automation is becoming a reality in service industries just like it has in manufacturing.

Inflated Expectations

[Kadin2048]

Yes. But the reason they went `out of style' is because neither one of them ever really met the (perhaps inflated) expectations of the people making the predictions.

We don't have VR because doing good VR is hard and requires expensive hardware. Likewise with 3D -- another technology that seems to come up every few years as the `next big thing,' but then never is. AI is even more difficult than that; it's hard enough making a computer simulate a cockroach, much less a cat or dog, and certainly not a person. I suspect that that before we get a convincing AI that approaches human capabilities, they'll have gotten the size of neural-implantable electrodes down to the point where it's easier to put a human brain in a tank and attach it to interfaces that simulate senses than it is to simulate the brain itself. (Especially given that there is a market and demand for electrodes for other purposes besides brains-in-jars, e.g. artificial vision and hearing).

Partly it's a chicken-and-egg problem. The hardware developers and manufacturers, who might have the resources to bring us a $40, motion sensitive VR headset, don't think that there is a demand. But part of the reason that there isn't a demand is because of the assumption on the part of consumers that such things will always be ridiculously expensive. And so the status quo prevails.