PaPeRo, the personal home robot brought to you by NEC (see PaPeRo Robot Childcare In Japan for more information), now has a new function. It can blog about the most important person in your life - you.
NEC has now included new functionality with PaPeRo to allow it take elements of your daily life and blog them on the Internet. When a user converses with PaPeRo over the course of the day, PaPeRo records and analyzes your comments. It searches for related multi-media contents on the Internet, including music and images, and uploads the robot's view of your day. According to NEC:
"The novel system has been realized by integrating (1) large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition technology, which converts the speech content of the video message into text and extracts important keywords, and (2) natural language, text retrieval technology, which enables searching of contents on the Internet."
In doing this, PaPeRo imitates the Life of Johnson, the classic 1791 biography by James Boswell. Boswell's work was considered radical in its time because he included actual conversations and other day-to-day information about his subject (as opposed to dry, factual accounts) that he recorded in the pages of his journal.
Now, each of us can have his own personal blogging Boswell. PaPeRo uses the resources of the Internet to expand its journal of your daily actions.
“A page of my journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion.”
James Boswell (1740-1795)
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