robot dog that talks in british accent and sounds like human? boston dynamics says, why not?

Boston Dynamics’ SPOT the robot dog can talk!

By now, fans of Boston Dynamics already know Spot, the all-around robot dog that can conduct sniff tests, dance and party like its life depends on jiving, and even monitor construction to make sure everyone’s doing their job in the safest way possible. But recently, Boston Dynamics unveiled a new feature of the robot that is a dream come true for dog lovers: by integrating ChatGPT, the four-legged robot can now talk in multiple accents and personalities, including the British and American accents, and it sounds like a real human speaking.

As viewers can see in the video, Spot the robot dog embodies several personalities depending on what language system the user puts it into. Its viper-like mouth opens and closes as it talks, and the voices that come out of its automated mouth are not at all whiny or robotic, but sound like a real person talking. And what does Boston Dynamics imagine Spot to be with the new feature? A tour and museum guide. So, yes, Spot the robot dog with its mini hat and round eyes can soon become the guide informing visitors about the rich history and backstories of a place, an artwork, or an object. But how is it possible?

video stills by Boston Dynamics via Youtube

Let the talking begin using openAI’s chatGPT

Boston Dynamics is interested in demoing Spot’s speaking abilities using language models such as ChatGPT. The team says that these models are capable of autocomplete algorithms, which means that as they take in a stream of text, they can also predict the next bit of that very (incomplete) text. Boston Dynamics was inspired by this feature, alongside the recently released Visual Question Answering (VQA) models that can caption images and answer simple questions about them. By setting up some simple hardware integrations and several software models for Spot, the robot dog has been tested to become a tour and museum guide, complete with coherent language and speaking abilities as if it were a real human being.

Boston Dynamics then equipped Spot the robot dog with a camera, speaker, and microphone so that it can see where the visitors are and understand what the people are asking or telling it, and for it to be able to reply and be heard. Now, for the conversation skills, OpenAI’s ChatGPT — starting with gpt-3.5 before upgrading to gpt-4 — was embedded into its system. The team — comprising Matt Klingensmith, Michael McDonald, Radhika Agrawal, Chris Allum, and Rosalind Shinkle — shares that since ChatGPT generates text-based responses, they also ran these through a text-to-speech tool so that Spot the robot dog can actually talk to the tour audience.

Spot the robot dog talks and embodies several personalities depending on what language system the user puts it into

What did spot the robot dog do again, sorry?

As viewers can see in the video, Spot the robot dog is confident in guiding the visitor around objects or a piece of work by informing them about the facts and data of a certain object. What surprised Boston Dynamics during the demo was that when they asked Spot who Marc Raibert was, the robot dog powered by ChatGPT responded with ‘I don’t know. Let’s go to the IT help desk and ask!’ then it walked towards the staff member at the IT help desk and asked that person who Marc Raibert was.

Boston Dynamics explains that it didn’t even code the robot dog to ask anyone for help, meaning that the robot dog just did it on its own. Another example that the team noticed was that when they asked Spot who its parents were, it strolled towards the office where Boston Dynamics’ previous versions of Spots — named Spot V1 and Big Dog — were located and then told the person who asked that those old robot dogs were its elders.

‘We were also surprised at just how well the LLM was at staying in character even as we gave it ever more absurd personalities. We learned right away that snarky or sarcastic personalities worked really well; and we even got the robot to go on a bigfoot hunt around the office, asking random passerby whether they’d seen any cryptids around,’ the team writes in a post. Boston Dynamics will continue to test Spot the robot dog and its ChatGPT language model, including (but not limited to) assigning a task to a robot just by talking to it.

using chatGPT, Spot the robot dog can talk with British or American accents