How Shimi may look, Holiday 2013 (via Tovbot.com)
When it comes to music, I always welcome new recommendations and a buddy to dance along to new music beside me. Unfortunately, this does not happen very often. But a team at the Center for Music Technology at Georgia Tech is developing a musical companion robot that incorporates musical suggestions and dancing among many other functions and it will always be ready to rock.
The robot is called Shimi and it is capable of unprecedented musical interaction. Shimi has a dock for android phones and through this, it can tap into any musical apps you have and can access the mic and camera. It can perform a wide range of functions like use music making apps from your phone to compose its own dance beat while it “shimmies” to it. The bot can even analyze beats clapped by the user and match the song that best fits that beat from the musical library.
For a robot, Shimi is very accommodating. It can get to know your musical taste and suggest new songs or artists based on your current library and user feedback it collects. It could also track your position to make sure it is adjusts its speakers in an optimal direction
Developers are still at work to come up with other innovative interactions. Apps are in development that will allow Shimi to look at the user’s head or hand motions to perform functions like skip songs or turn up the volume.
A new company called Tovbot has been created that will manage the sales and distribution of this musical bot. Tovbot expects to have Shimi available for the 2013 holiday season. Shimi was presented at the Google I/O conference.
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