Samsung’s press conference at CES 2019 was full of artificial intelligence announcements, and TVs. But Samsung had one more thing to show off before it closed its press conference. And that was an update on its robotics platform, as well as the future of AI for that platform. Samsung decided to offer a peek to the future of Connected Living. On-stage, it demonstrated how one of these robots, Bot Care, would work in the real life. There are four robots that Samsung showed off today, besides the Bot Care, there is also Bot Air, Bot Retail and GEMS. Bot Air is a robot that can monitor the air quality and detect pollution sources using sensors. While Bot Retail is a platform that can be used for customer service, as well as helping out with ordering and payments. Finally, the GEMS platform is one that will be able to help athletes train and give support to those that might have mobility issues.
Samsung’s a bit late in the whole “robots at CES” craze
While Samsung might be late bringing robots to CES, Samsung is not late to the party with robots in general. Samsung now, typically doesn’t announce products like this prematurely. Instead, it waits for the products to mature a bit, so that they are less likely to fail in demos, but also actually do some useful things. Unlike other companies, who have been bringing robots to CES for many years now, Samsung wanted to wait until it had a reason to use these robots, and the Bot Care is one of the most useful robots we’ve seen. Bot Care is a personal health care assistant, who can take your blood pressure by having you simply touch right below the screen. And it appears to take your blood pressure fairly quickly (this was the demo Samsung did on stage during its press conference today). However, there are going to be plenty of questions about how accurate that is going to be. And the answer is likely, pretty inaccurate. But it can also see how stressed you are, and help you get rid of that stress.
Bot Care looks very, very similar to LG’s Cloi robot from last year
Last year, LG went all in on robots in their press conference, and had a number of them out on display during the show. Including Cloi which was a personal assistant. Similar to Samsung’s Bot Care. And it looks very familiar, aside from a few different curves on the body of Bot Care, if you saw them together, you likely wouldn’t know which was which. This isn’t surprising, seeing as they are both from South Korea, so there’s bound to be similar design cues here. But typically Samsung is the one to announce something and then have LG come around and do something similar. It’s a bit interesting to see it the other way around this time. LG didn’t focus much on robots this time around at CES, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be any on display at its booth when the CES show floor opens to everyone tomorrow.