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The future is apparently here. And it's creepier than we ever imagined—even when we were playing around with tethering Teddy Ruxpin to the Internet. A Japanese company called Vinclu ("a company that makes crazy things and supports crazy people") is now taking pre-orders from Japan and the United States for a new interactive, artificial-intelligence driven home automation system. Called Gatebox, the new Internet-of-Things product takes Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, Spike Jonze's film Her , and the "holographic" anime characters of Vocaloid concerts to their unified natural conclusion.
Wait, what?
Gatebox, priced at ¥321,840 (about $2,700 US), is squarely targeted at young lonely salarymen and all brands of anime-obsessed otaku—promising the experience of "living with your favorite character." The size of a home coffee-maker, with a footprint no larger than a sheet of A4 printer paper, the device's main feature is a clear projection tube that displays a computer-animated avatar for the AI's "character." Vinclu apparently is planning multiple possible personalities for Gatebox—which, as part of the device's backstory, is a gateway to the dimension the character lives in.
A company like this could release the first strong AI product (kawaii slave?).
Beginner's definition of "waifu" for the uninitiated.
Update: Another article indicates that "[There's also] HDMI and PC inputs to allow the owner to make their own modifications and create their own characters."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:01AM
I don't get Vocaloid. Music aside, it just sounds like you're listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks, like those god-awful "Alvin and the Chipmunks sing the latest pop songs" from the late 80's.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 21 2016, @04:38AM
The actual Vocaloid software has improved over time. Some of the remaining weirdness is probably related to the electronic style or use of auto-tuning. Or in the case of Japanese, more higher pitched squeakiness. I just looked on YouTube for a Vocaloid song and found this English one [youtube.com]. Would you put it in the Alvin bin?
In any case, synthesized speech in general appears to have made a dramatic leap in quality [soylentnews.org], among other machine learning tasks over at Google [soylentnews.org]. In a year or two, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and/or Samsung will upgrade their cloud-based AI assistants and make them sound great even if they still suck at figuring out what to do with complex queries. And in the next 5 years, I'd expect to see the synthesization of a single voice that can sound sultry, mad, sad, happy, caring, depressed, etc. without it just sounding like a squeaky robotic anime girl. That doesn't necessarily mean that voice actors are instantly out of a job... Vocaloid used human voice samples, and I expect newer machine learning voice algorithms to suck up as much real life data as possible.
Anyway, you get the sultry voice right, and a key piece of your sexbot or holographic waifu puzzle has been found.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]