Alphabet's working on the robot of the future

Welcome to Alphabet city. I'm your guide Iyaz Akhtar I don't care what Jay Jonah says Spiderman is not a menace. Google sister company x is talking about its everyday robot project. In a blog post. The company says it's been working for the last few years to find out quote, if it's possible to create robots that can do a range of useful tasks in the messy, unstructured spaces of our everyday lives. Our moonshot is to see if we can make robots as helpful to people in the physical world as computers are in the virtual world end quote. Now every robot story will get people worrying about the robot apocalypse. The post explains how dumb Robots are compared to humans. Now humans make sense of a lot of inputs to determine what to do next. As an example, the post talks about how when everybody objects like chairs, or coffee cups show up or moved in a location. That is quote, very mysterious, to a robot. But the robots are getting smarter thanks to X and Google AI. Test showed that robots can learn by giving them simple tasks and practicing. Okay, what do you need a robot to do every day? The team at X decided to teach the robots How to sort waste. That means the robots would have to be able to recognize what an item was and then place it in the corresponding bin. Test started in computers with virtual robots dealing with virtual junk. Look. That data was eventually transfferred to real robots, in turn, the real robot data woudl be fed back into the virtual robot. So how did these robots do? Well, they reduced office waste contamination from 20% to less than 5% By the way, 20% contamination is the usual amount by humans, according to the Post. The company says it will be years before the helpful robots it imagines will be here. If you're wondering what X is it was formally known as Google X when Google restructured X became a separate company outside of Google. And under alphabet, Google X and X come up with what seems to be insane ideas to take on problems. X has had a number of successful projects, the self driving tech that eventually became waymo came out of x Project Loon, a method of delivering Internet using balloons. Became it's own company, under Alphabet, X even has a project where kites can harness wind energy. This is not Alphabet's first go-round with robots, Google X once owned Boston Dynamics for a time period. Boston Dynamics robots are pretty famous at this point, because they can come across as amazing and creepy, and sometimes both at the same time. They have the Big Dog, which is a robot pack mule. Then there's Atlas, the humanoid robot sent to haunt your dreams. Watch this video, where it decides to leave its robo-family, and take to a forest covered in snow. Atlas is pretty good at balancing. And we've got to show you this clip where people torment Atlas with sticks. This just seems mean. You can see that x is new approach to robotics differs a bit when it comes to the physical form of the robot. The X robots are more like a one armed version of the robot from short circuit, Johnny five Atlas seems like something out of a Terminator film. Which one seems more everyday? A slim, wheeled robot or a bipedal one? Boston Dynamics robots seem more for a military or police application while the new X robots looks like walking stick vacuum. Let's say X can get this robot to where it wants to go. Does that mean any of us can just go out and buy one eventually? So far, many of access projects seem to be beyond personal in nature. The stuff from Waymo, is one that seems to actually connect with people and a one on one kind of way. I would imagine, the first real clients of the everyday Robert, would be in the service industry and office buildings. I think it would be easy to imagine these devices, and hospitals as well. So what I'm saying is you won't be having a robot Butler built by X anytime soon. What a bummer. On to comment code. This is the part of the show we shine a spotlight at the most amazing audience in the world. You. last time I explained why no one should buy a Pixel phone on day one. Most of my argument relied on Google's steep discount on the Pixel4 After just one month of its release Javier says early buyers just contact Google support to get price protection. I did that yesterday and got the promotion applied. Well, this is good news. How'd you do it? Javier explained on your phone, go to Settings, select tips and support its way on the bottom and then you can choose to chat or call I did mine over chat just explained to them that you just bought it yesterday and that you want the offer price protection. Javier also said he was unsure if it works outside of their online store. That was extremely useful. Thanks for that information. And also thanks to everyone for writing in is actor and I'll see you online.