iPal the robot is designed to be your child's best friend
AvatarMind is preparing for the US launch of iPal, a robot companion for children from four to eight. Already in use in China, the robot uses natural language understanding technology, cloud apps and claims to be able to respond to emotions, enabling "banter" with children with the aim of becoming their "best friend." It constantly takes photos and videos, accessible by parents' smartphones. However, studies have shown that severe social dysfunction occurs in infant animals when attachments with inanimate surrogates develop, and a leading professor of artificial intelligence and robotics called the product "awful."
Machines already make your coffee, bot their way around the kitchen floor cleaning up after you and then help drive you to work, so why can't they also help out with the hardest part of a morning (noon and evening) routine: raising kids?

Very soon they could. Meet the iPal, a rolling, talking robotic nanny currently serving children in China and set for American shores very soon.

The iPal is the creation of AvatarMind(opens in a new tab), a two-year-old company with offices in China and Silicon Valley. It's designed to be a "full time companion," for your progeny, the company says(opens in a new tab), combining a "cute cartoon outlook, fine craft work, natural language understanding technology and cloud apps."

"It will be your child's best friend."

How will this friendship blossom? Well, its autonomous learning engine helps it remember preferences and interests and builds on them to improve conversation, its creators say, giving it the banter of a 4- to 8-year-old. It also monitors the cloud to "increase its knowledge on subjects of interest to your child."

So far so normal in this day and age. Anyone who's ever had to sort out their banking or insurance over the phone has bounced through a battalion of robo-voices to get to a helping human. Beyond that, though, things get a little more creepy.

Credit: avatarmind

The iPal has "many sensors to feel touch, listen to speech and detect emotion" with an "emotion management system" that senses and responds to happiness, depression and loneliness. It's happy when your child is happy and encourages them when they're sad.

Did we mention it constantly takes photos and videos of your child? These snapshots, which help it monitor growth, can be accessed by parents on their phone - wherever they may be by this point. And a bunch of apps will make sure your child wakes up on time, knows what the weather is like, and has washed his or her hands.

Don't think hanging out with an iPal will make your little one a friendless loser, either; they can make buddies via the Child Messenger app and video chat with them too. Because why hang out IRL?

The iPal packs in 25 motors within its 3-foot body, which sits on four wheels and houses a 6-inch LCD screen and a 3-watt soundsystem. It comes packed with apps and can read the same bedtime story again and again and again and again. It will also answer any question your kid throws at it, passing on the harder ones until it gets the correct response from a human who shares that answer with every other iPal. Smarter kids will even be able to learn programming on it.

Credit: avatarmind

The iPal could look after children aged 3 to 8 for "a couple of hours," AvatarMind founder Jiping Wang told the Guardian(opens in a new tab) at RoboBusiness(opens in a new tab) in California this week. Those hours when school's out but parents still have their noses to the grindstone would be prime time, he said.

Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, has been warning of robo-nannies for years. In 2008, he wrote a piece for (opens in a new tab)Science(opens in a new tab) warning that "children could be left without human contact for many hours a day or perhaps for several days, and the possible psychological impact of the varying degrees of social isolation on development is unknown."

We don't know what the effects of long-term exposure of infants to robot caregivers would be, he added, but "we can get some indication from early psychological work on maternal deprivation and attachment."

"Studies of early development in monkeys have shown that severe social dysfunction occurs in infant animals allowed to develop attachments only to inanimate surrogates."

Asked by the Guardian for his thoughts on iPal, he simply said: "This is awful."

The iPal's creators are hoping(opens in a new tab) to bring it to the U.S. next year.