Asus Zenbo – A cool and futuristic home assistance robot
Ever wanted to have your own Wall-E or R2D2? Well, Asus is here to grant you the wish. The Asus Zenbo was announced today at the Computex in Taipei. Robots in the living room is not a far away dream. We have devices like the Roomba cleaners which are specifically designed for one task. Then on the other side there are devices like the Google Home or Amazon Echo, which sit in a corner of your living room and provide you voice based assistance. Zenbo is a step further.
While revealing ASUS Zenbo, Chairman Shih said, “For decades, humans have dreamed of owning such a companion: one that is smart, dear to our hearts, and always at our disposal. Our ambition is to enable robotic computing for every household.”
Asus Zenbo can move around the house freely and can understand speech commands. It can be a digital companion for people of any age, but it has special features to help senior citizens and kids. It can remind users on medical appointments or medicine schedules. It can detect if the user needs any sort of medical assistance and can alert family members or contact emergency help line. The Zenbo can help in making video calls or online shopping. It can also display streaming media content, all controlled with voice commands and guided navigation. Zenbo can be a fun companion for kids. It can entertain kids with stories, music, games or videos.
The Zenbo is also a smarthome solution. It can control all your connected house hold appliances and electronics. It can be a security gatekeeper, a family photographer, a kitchen assistant or even a infant monitor. All these are just a few of the usecases that team Asus has come up. The Zenbo developer program gives access to the SDK and other library of APIs that can help you build your own apps and functionality around the Asus Zenbo. You may visit zenbo.asus.com, if interested in the Asus Zenbo Developer program.
But the chance of this device being available in India is very remote. The international pricing of $599 for such a versatile home automation and assistance solution, is very attractive.
