It’s been nearly a year since Sphero, the company known best for making lovable Star Wars droids into connected toys, announced that it would be spinning off a new startup, Misty Robotics, that’s dedicated to bringing robot assistants to smart homes. And now, we’re getting our first chance to bring one of these bots into our homes. At CES 2019, the company announced that its adorable Misty II robots are ready to ship in April 2019 with a starting price tag of $2400, according to TechCrunch.
Misty first showed off the new Misty II, a slightly more advanced version of the original Misty robot the company debuted at CES in January 2018. As per Misty’s landing page for the bot, the Misty II is “professional grade, hardware-extensible, and purpose-built as a development platform.” Meant for developers of both the amateur and professional variety, the Misty II promises to be “easy to make powerful,” but is DIY enough to keep robotics fans interested.
At six pounds and just over a foot tall (14 inches, to be exact), the Misty II is a relatively small robot and meant for either the home or the office. It comes complete with a number of features that can help it safely navigate these scenarios, including a 3D Occipital sensor for mapping, a 4K Sony camera for facial and object recognition, and eight sensors to help avoid obstacles.
But what Misty II actually does for its owners is completely up to them. Depending on how the robot is programmed, it could serve as a security guard, tasked with investigating strange noises or opening the door; or as an extra pair of hands for mom and dad, checking in on children to ensure they’ve completed their chores. Ultimately, Misty wants its customers to dream up applications for the Misty II that the company itself can’t even conceive of. After all, the company’s goal is to put a robot in every home, which means that its robots will have to be able to execute a wide range of tasks.
To program Misty II, users can leverage a block-based programming interface Misty developed itself, as well as JavaScript APIs to create new skills or integrations with third-party services like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. Misty II also has two Qualcomm SnapDragon processors running Windows IoT Core and Android 8 operating systems.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.