Google adds AI language skills to its helper robots to better understand humans

Google’s parent company Alphabet is bringing together two of its most ambitious research projects — robotics and AI language understanding — in an attempt to make a “helper robot” that can understand natural language commands.

Since 2019, Alphabet been developing robots that can carry out simple tasks like fetching drinks and cleaning surfaces. This Everyday Robots project is still in its infancy — the robots are slow and hesitant — but the bots have now been given an upgrade: improved language understanding courtesy of Google’s large language model (LLM) PaLM.

Most robots only respond to short and simple instructions, like “bring me a bottle of water.” But LLMs like GPT-3 and Google’s MuM are able to better parse the intent behind more...

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