Source丨Venture Bang (ID: ichuangyebang)
Author丨Juny
Editor丨Sea waist
图源丨roboticgizmos
What is a mobile phone? A piece of hardware, a tool. A more official definition is a mobile device that can be used to make phone calls and has a multi-tasking mobile computing.
But have you ever thought that as the item you use the most every day from morning to night, maybe one day your mobile phone can also have a "soul", you can let it accompany you to interact and chat, play games and entertainment, and even quarrel with you at any time.
Note that the "soul" here does not just refer to the AI voice assistant, but a robot with a real "body" that can smile and wink at you, and can speak and move.
Recently, a Chinese startup team is turning this animated imagination into reality through a desktop hardware and ChatGPT.
After the new hardware product called Looi was launched on Kickstarter not long ago, it has already received more than 100 times the target subscription support in a short period of time, and many people believe that it is the most interesting AI application hardware they have seen in recent times, and it has even attracted Musk's attention and reviews in the past few days.
So, what sets Looi apart?
Every phone has a "soul"
Looi's development team believes that there is an interesting "soul" living in every smartphone.
When you place your smartphone on a removable device that resembles a phone holder, you'll wake up an AI robot called Looi, which will open its eyes on your phone's screen and officially transform into your smart companion.
First of all, Looi has visual, auditory, and obstacle recognition capabilities, which can move autonomously on your desktop, intelligently recognize various objects and gestures, and react differently according to your different gestures. For example, when you are in OK pose, it will automatically take a picture of you, when you put your thumb down, it will express a lost expression and sound, when you open your palm and approach it, it will step back in fear, and then it will follow your gesture curiously.
When not receiving commands, he can always observe his surroundings and analyze everything he sees, and can even take photos and quick P pictures to show his different emotions and attitudes towards the things he is interested in. For example, when it sees an orange on the table, it smiles and gives the orange a blast head.
In addition, Looi, equipped with a bionic behavior system and ChatGPT, is able to understand your verbal instructions and give different information feedback and emotional responses. With the support of AI, it does not simply obey orders, but has the ability to think independently. As you continue to talk to it, it will get to know you better and will later develop deeper and more personalized interactions with you.
Looi's bionic function also gives it a rich emotional response, through the on-screen eye animation design, Looi can express dozens of different emotions including happiness, anger, sadness, doubt, etc., with more than 600 custom actions. It can toast you, help you celebrate your birthday, and discuss a problem with you to the point of speechlessness and anger. This interactive design that combines emotion and action makes your phone no longer just a cold machine, but makes people feel like they are really communicating with an emotional entity.
What's even more interesting is that Looi even dreams every day. It will record its dreams in the form of pictures and journals, and you can ask it questions and retrieve them. According to the R&D team, Looi's behavior and emotions on the second day will even change due to the dreams he had the day before.
Clearly positioned consumer-grade desktop products
From all of these features, you might feel like Looi is a desktop toy or an electronic pet that's primarily responsible for providing emotional prices. But in fact, in addition to interacting and talking to you, Looi also hides a lot of more practical features.
For example, it can be an auto-tracking camera mount that can be used as a photographer when you need to have a meeting, make a presentation, record a video, or take a photo with friends.
You can also use it to play some interactive motion capture games for fun after work.
Of course, if you don't want any smart features, you can simply use it as a 15W MagSafe wireless charging station, a customizable desktop alarm clock or call reminder, or even a removable lighting flashlight that automatically adjusts to the room lights.
Overall, Looi's product positioning is to create a smart and practical device that is affordable for everyone's daily life scenarios.
Currently priced from just $129 on Kickstarter, Looi includes a Looi removable stand device, a magnetic ring accessory that makes it compatible with different phones, and a companion Looi software system. According to the plan, mass production of the equipment is expected to begin in July 2024 and shipments will begin in August.
Since no consumers have yet gotten their hands on the actual machine, it is still unknown how smart Looi is, how fast it responds, how ChatGPT can be used, and how much power it consumes.
However, from the answers to users' questions in the Kickstarter comment section of the R&D team, we can get some more detailed information about Looi, the highlights of which include:
- All of Looi's algorithms, including vision and voice recognition, will run natively on the smartphone, and no private user data will be uploaded to the cloud, allowing users to still use most of Looi's features even when the phone is offline.
- Looi has integrated ChatGPT into the device and fine-tuned it for Looi's specific use case, so users don't need to log in on their own. Currently, after downloading the Looi App, users can use GPT 4.0 for free and query the Internet as many times as they like, and if they need unlimited Internet access, they will need to pay a monthly subscription fee in the future.
- Looi only uses the phone's camera and microphone in robot mode, and all photos or videos taken by Looi are stored in the phone's local Looi App album.
- Currently, Looi only supports English interaction, and plans to expand more languages in the future.
Since its launch in February, Looi's popularity has continued to ferment, and it has now raised more than 100 times the target. And as more and more netizens begin to become interested in this cute new AI hardware product, it has even attracted Musk's attention in the past few days.
Musk responded to a tweet about Looi by well-known tech blogger Linus Ekenstam with a line from the cartoon "Rick and Morty" "Pass the butter."
In Rick and Morty, Rick the Inventor creates a small tabletop mobile robot similar to Looi, which he uses to hand butter to himself at the family table.
Source: Twitter
The all-Chinese team has sharpened a sword in five years
Boosted by Musk's traffic, Looi, which has not yet been officially mass-produced, has attracted more widespread attention. Media around the world, including the United States, India, and Japan, have reported on Looi, but behind Looi is an all-Chinese entrepreneurial team.
Founded in 2022 in Dongguan, Guangdong, Looi is the first product developed by a young company called TangibleFuture, which aims to create a new interactive device that transcends the boundaries of traditional hardware forms and content experiences by blending and innovating experiences such as robotics hardware, board games or video games, traditional storytelling and multi-media storytelling.
One of the founders of TangibleFuture, Zhang Xiaohui, graduated from the School of Design and Art of Hunan University, with a main research direction of human-computer interaction and industrial design, and worked as an industrial designer at JBL. Another founder, You Wei, graduated from the Department of Automation of the University of Science and Technology of China with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the China Academy of Art, is an interdisciplinary talent of hardware + design, and has served as an algorithm engineer of Yiqing Technology.
In fact, Looi is a product that has been polished for 5 years and has been iterated three times. Since his professional direction is Tangible Interaction, his idea at that time was to create a new interactive product based on mobile phones, turning the personal terminal of mobile phones into a movable form, completely breaking the two-dimensional interaction mode of the past.
Since the prototype of his graduation design in 2019, Looi has gone through three iterations, made many upgrades in appearance and hardware, and has gradually developed into more modalities such as interface, voice, and gestures in terms of interactive functions.
Zhang Xiaohui said in a previous interview that in the past five years, the design concept of Looi has been in the same vein, always insisting on the mobile phone as the center, constantly polishing the relationship between hardware and mobile phone, mobile phone and environment in design, and finally turning it into a desktop scene and creating a new physical interaction form.
Regarding Looi's product positioning, Zhang Xiaohui said that he hopes that Looi will have the dual integration attributes of companions and pets. On the one hand, it is dependent on people like a pet, which inspires users to interact with it and take care of it. On the other hand, with the blessing of AI, it can have an independent "personality" and thinking ability, which in turn produces sparks of thinking and communication similar to that between people.
Looi's design iteration and current hardware composition
AI mobile hardware, the next outlet?
Since the second half of last year, as generative AI technology has matured, the previously neglected AI hardware track has begun to heat up visibly, among which mobile small devices represented by AI Pins, AI mobile phones, and AI glasses are particularly favored.
For example, Humane, an AI hardware startup founded by former Apple's software engineering director and designer, has raised $230 million in funding from investors including Sam Altman, Microsoft, Kindred Ventures, Tiger Fund, and others.
The AI pocket companion Rabbit R1, developed by a Chinese entrepreneur, made a lot of attention at this year's CES, quickly selling out 20,000 orders in two days, and the cumulative financing has reached $30 million. In January, Tab AI, a life companion AI necklace, was also favored by Aravind Srinivas, co-founder of Perplexity, and successfully raised $1.9 million in seed funding.
In addition to a large number of startups integrated into the AI mobile hardware track, technology giants have also opened the book one after another. Google is bringing generative AI capabilities to the Pixel 8 series and plans to launch upgraded AI smart glasses, Amazon will build a new version of Alexa, a smart speaker based on a new large language model, and Meta has announced that it will add new AI features to its Ray-ban smart glasses.
In response to this hot trend, The Verge published an article last week proposing that starting this April, we will witness the beginning of the "AI gadget era". In the coming weeks, some new AI mobile hardware will be updated and released, including Humane's voice-controlled AI Pin, the Rabbit R1 will begin mass shipping, and Brilliant Labs' ChatGPT-powered AR glasses will be officially launched.
左为Rabbit R1,右为Brilliant Labs的AI眼镜
In the middle of last year, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 Group, proposed that "multi-modal large model + Internet of Things" would be the next outlet. He said that when the large model is connected to the intelligent hardware, the capabilities of the large model will be released from the digital world and eventually to the physical world.
At present, hardware devices are not only the input port of the physical world information of the AI model, but also the carrier of content presentation. But at the same time, in the future, these hardware forms may also change a lot, they may not be mobile phones, stereos, glasses and other objects that we are already familiar with, but will appear in the form of new hardware like AI Pin, like Rabbit R1, like Looi, which has never been seen before, but what they all have in common is to put artificial intelligence in the first place of experience.
As the application competition of large models gradually enters the white heat, the hardware track may soon usher in a period of savage growth. But what is almost certain for now is that mobile hardware will not miss out on the dividends of the era of the AI wave.