First Bar Night

That's Droid at Ziggy's, at the table, on a Thursday. Nobody in that photo is running a demo. That's the point. Bar hopping is his thing because a crowded patio is the hardest room a home robot will ever work: strangers everywhere, music, clinking glasses, and one voice in all of it that he's actually supposed to listen to.

He learned the room

At home, Droid listens for speech against near silence. A bar is forty times louder before anyone says a word to him. His new ears, a four-microphone array with hardware echo cancellation, spent the first minute just listening, and his hearing floor climbed to meet the room, from basement-quiet all the way up to patio-loud. After that, the crowd noise stopped counting as speech and the person leaning in to talk to him cut through cleanly.

Then it worked. Over the noise of a full patio, on a phone hotspot, he heard and answered. That sentence took two days of tuning and one microphone that finally deserved him, and it's the sentence that matters most for what comes next.

Full disclosure: some of that tuning shipped from the laptop at the table, mid-beer, with music playing overhead, while he sat there listening. The bar was the lab.

A robot walks into a bar and gets a speaker

His chest speaker is honest but small, and a patio eats small. So mid-evening he got a JBL for a voice, paired from a laptop at the table between rounds. The plan is that next time it takes two words: "party mode."

The radio gods sent a lesson along with it: Bluetooth and phone hotspots share the same slice of air, and a robot streaming what he hears while speaking through Bluetooth is fighting himself for bandwidth. Field trips exist to find exactly this kind of thing. It's fixed with a settings toggle, and it's in the venue checklist now, three weeks before it could have mattered on a stage.

Bar manners

The quietest thing he did all night might be the most important. Four humans at a table talk over each other, wander between topics, and only sometimes talk to the robot. Droid spent the evening studying exactly that: who's speaking, from where, and whether it was meant for him. He keeps his conclusions to himself for now, on purpose. A robot learns when to talk the same way people do, by listening first.

Come see him work a real room

Droid demos live at the Tech Builders Showcase on September 14 at Groover Labs in Wichita, hosted by NXTUS and Accelerate Venture Partners. Registration is free. The recon story is here.

And if your event could use the guest everybody remembers, book Droid and Eva. They've got bar experience now. It's on the resume.