Educational Robot Emelya: Pudding S Review

Emelya (trans­lat­ed), or Pud­ding (orig­i­nal) made a lot of noise. Lit­er­al­ly in a month, a colos­sal hype was cre­at­ed around, the num­ber of requests for it grav­i­tates to 6 thou­sand per month, and the largest of the most read wrote about it (whether for a fee / for that). Let’s take a clos­er look, shall we?

The cost of a robot with­out 10 rubles is 10 thou­sand, and for this mon­ey you should get an inter­ac­tive assis­tant to you in the form of a robot nan­ny for a child. Let’s go through the crit­i­cism.

The first thing that is usu­al­ly dis­cussed is the indif­fer­ence of par­ents and the unwill­ing­ness of young peo­ple to take care of chil­dren. With foam at the mouth, edu­ca­tors of future gen­er­a­tions with expe­ri­ence prove that this, they say, is not the case. On the whole, we under­stand that the robot will not bring up the best feel­ings, will not teach you to pro­tect nature and love the Kom­so­mol, but is it the task before him? — Not real­ly. Emelya is still an inter­ac­tive edu­ca­tion­al project, a lit­tle helper for answer­ing sim­ple ques­tions. How does he deal with it? — Let’s find out below.

The sec­ond thing is the cam­era. And here, in gen­er­al, shout the guard. Yes, we also know that every­thing can be stolen from per­son­al data to secret codes. But regard­ing the home cam­era, pri­va­cy advo­cates are some­how par­tic­u­lar­ly vocal. Of course, there is a dan­ger, and we also recent­ly wrote about this with a link to Mash­able: there is a new busi­ness in Chi­na!

But, first­ly, if you put this cri­te­ri­on at the fore­front, then yes: you don’t need to buy a Pud­ding robot, Xiao­mi cam­eras, Netat­mo, or Canary. Dot. How­ev­er, the process is quite the oppo­site: demand for home video sur­veil­lance is excel­lent, espe­cial­ly notice­able dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son, and niche devices like Pud­ding — for chil­dren or PetCube — for ani­mals are desir­able.

And, of course, those who want to remain unseen through a Wi-fi cam­era loud­est of all are those who live a rather bor­ing life, which you won’t look at for noth­ing — not just for mon­ey. But in the gen­er­al choir you don’t hear every note — you only react to the vol­ume.

Thus, if edu­ca­tion­al and obser­va­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties are crit­i­cal for you, you don’t have to look fur­ther. Who is ready to com­pro­mise — please.

Emelya or Pudding?

In Rus­sia, the Pud­ding robot will respond to Emelya, after which you can have a con­ver­sa­tion with him. While the process of “opti­miza­tion” for the Russ­ian user is under­way, not every­one will sup­port Emel’s con­ver­sa­tion, although this is the most inter­est­ing part of the inter­ac­tive. Here are just a few exam­ples:

Quite sim­ple ques­tions can be processed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. The pro­cess­ing algo­rithm is prob­a­bly not very com­pli­cat­ed, at some points it comes down to a sim­ple search, like “Ok, Google”.

But you can’t send Emelyan to the exam in Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture. The fact is that the machine is still con­fused and does not know how to fil­ter and slip infor­ma­tion log­i­cal­ly. That’s right — he can:

But to guess what you need is not quite yet:

And after all, none of us will say that the robot answered the ques­tion incor­rect­ly. What, there is no such play? Or lies? He quotes infor­ma­tion from Wikipedia — and noth­ing more. But until he gets to the great clas­sic, time will pass. For fans of cre­ativ­i­ty, this may turn out to be strange and repul­sive, but for­mal­ly, Emelya is right and there can be no claims that he inter­pret­ed the ques­tion in a wrong way.

Let’s look further?

There are already enough crit­ics, it’s time to talk about pos­i­tive emo­tions. First­ly, Emelyan is cute. Its shape is quite con­sis­tent with the ideas of cute robots from car­toons, so the toy will not cause fear in the child.

The Pud­ding / Emelya con­sists of two parts: a stand with a sil­ver logo and a head. Emelya’s head rotates, which allows the cam­era to give you an overview of the room. There is also a dis­play with the help of which Emelya broad­casts her pix­el emo­tions and ear-speak­ers. On the sur­face, it is sta­ble, which is also achieved by an addi­tion­al sil­i­cone gas­ket.

The robot runs on a built-in bat­tery, and in order not to waste it, a stand­by or sleep mode is pro­vid­ed. This is imple­ment­ed very, as it was cus­tom­ary to say in 2007, “nice”: the kit has spe­cial eyes that are attached by clos­ing the cam­era using mag­nets: this leaves no marks and does not require effort.

At the same time, the robot looks even more “human”:

In gen­er­al, I would note that accord­ing to the first impres­sions, right out of the box, Emelya inspires con­fi­dence: he looks very kind and may well claim to be a fam­i­ly mem­ber.

The cam­era is not “under the dis­play”, it is easy to find it above the “face”:

Emelya shows the sit­u­a­tion in both hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal ori­en­ta­tions:

Point the cam­era at the place you would like to see with the arrows: you can see them from below. More­over, if you notice that a child, instead of learn­ing lessons, watch­es TV, sleeps instead of eat­ing or eats instead of vac­u­um­ing, then you can send a voice mes­sage, which will be voiced by the robot.

Record? — Please. call? — No prob­lem. Every­thing is quite sim­ple, log­i­cal and con­ve­nient.

What did we fear and what did not hap­pen?

As you can see, the robot is con­trolled through IOS or Android appli­ca­tions, where there is an addi­tion­al base of train­ing mate­ri­als.

There are fables, fairy tales, and songs. Now there are so many books that not every­one has man­aged to read by today: 478.

So. You also noticed how Emelya voic­es infor­ma­tion and answers ques­tions. And we, in gen­er­al, were most wor­ried about whether the robot would read immor­tal works to us in the same voice. Will not be.

Audio­books are uploaded inside the appli­ca­tion, which are read by the actors. Here is a short exam­ple:

In that sense, it’s great.

A few words about connection

Emelya quite sim­ply becomes your friend: the Rus­si­fied appli­ca­tion pro­vides con­sis­tent tips for con­nect­ing the baby, and the process itself will take no more than 5 min­utes.

All: Emelya is ready for dia­logue and repro­duc­tion of infor­ma­tion.

How packed

Emelya is sup­plied in a gift box-cylin­der:

The main thing here is not to make a mis­take: do not remove the film and do not grab the blue tail: in this case, the low­er part with the robot will be on the floor, and this is not a war­ran­ty case.

Inside all the nec­es­sary com­po­nents: eyes, charg­ing cable and adapter:

Charges Pud­ding from the back. There is also a slot for a mem­o­ry card and an on / off but­ton for the robot:

As a summary

The robot is easy to oper­ate, visu­al­ly attrac­tive and able to quick­ly and accu­rate­ly answer the ques­tions. The embed­ded inter­ac­tive in the form of fairy tales and songs is a good base. Here we do not see a rad­i­cal dif­fer­ence between whether an actor or mom and dad will read “Trea­sure Island” and who a curi­ous kid will lis­ten to with great plea­sure. What if before bed? In the sub­dued light, a good voice reads an adven­ture sto­ry with expres­sion — I would have lis­tened myself.

You can also use Pud­ding as a sur­veil­lance cam­era when you go to the coun­try house or on a short trip to under­stand what is hap­pen­ing at home. This addi­tion­al fea­ture elim­i­nates the need to buy anoth­er device in the house, if you thought about it.

Quick com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the child: voice or in the form of broad­cast text mes­sages. And the ques­tion of price remains. Now in Rus­sia Pud­ding costs 9990 rubles, appar­ent­ly, before the first New Year’s sales.