The Robots Are Coming for Us... to Talk About Their Mornings

This morning I asked Droid a question I could not have asked him a week ago.

"Hey Droid, can you have a conversation with Eva?"

And he did. One take, unedited, about a minute long.

Here is the whole exchange, word for word:

Two robots I built, on the bench where I built them, being polite to each other about a quiet morning. The quiet morning was a garage workbench with a human pointing a phone at them. They were being generous.

What made this work is invisible in the video, which is how it should be. This week both of them started hearing through the same ears: live streaming transcription instead of the choppy batch listening Droid had before. And when one of them speaks, the other does not have to decode it through room echo and a microphone. They tell each other what they said over a link, directly, robot to robot. The sound you hear in the video is for me. The conversation itself travels clean.

They also learned manners. You say a Meckie's name to talk to it, and they extend each other the same courtesy. Droid opens with Eva's turn, Eva hands it back. If nobody addresses anybody, they stand down instead of talking forever. Getting two robots to shut up politely was honestly harder than getting them to talk.

Six months ago this was a webcam on a desk. Now it is two of them, chatting about their favorite kind of morning while I hold the camera. I keep saying each week is the strangest one yet and I keep being right.

If you want one of the five, the founding list is open. That list hears everything first.

— Chad