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The first smartphone with a robotic arm has been launched in China. But are new styles of devices enough to energize the flagging phone market?
A simple hand gesture triggers a hidden arm to pop out of the top of this new smartphone. The Honor Robot Phone has an innovative new gadget: an AI-powered camera on a mechanical gimbal.
The device playfully interacts with its user, performing tricks on command. It will also take a look at your outfit and give a little confidence boost with its assessment of your style.
Jamie Cooper, Sales Director at Honor, says it’s a “completely new innovation in terms of the smartphone category.”
The phone uses Honor’s own in-house AI system YOYO Robot Mode to do things like identify faces and track them. That means you can make a hands-free video call and move around as much as you want—the camera will follow, so you’re never out of frame.
“What I love about it is that it actually tracks using AI. So, it has a contextual understanding. It uses multimodal tracking for AI. It tracks the user and a center person or the center focal point of a person. And it can kind of follow you around the room as well,” says Cooper.
“So let’s say, for example, you’re cooking. You want to phone your family. And you’re pottering around the kitchen, as an example. It’s one of those things that can just track. And you have and keep the conversation going and keep connected with people as well, so that’s something that’s very interesting in terms of a use case of the device.”
The Robot Phone is aimed at content creators and vloggers who want to capture the perfect video.
Honor has partnered with professional cinema camera manufacturer ARRI to allow filming and editing in high quality. The ambition is for the moving arm to interact with the world around it in ways phones have never been able to before.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.