Science fiction promises us all sorts of sentient automatons once artificial intelligence becomes a part of our daily lives — not hockey puck-sized speakers. Determined to breathe more life into Amazon’s smart assistant, Thomas Burns hacked together a CRT TV and a pair of moving eyes to make Alexa feel more engaging — or look more like an eighth-grade science project, depending on how you look at it.
Although most devices with built-in smart assistants provide some kind of visual feedback that they’re listening and responding, Burns believes that users are more inclined to feel like they’re actually engaging with a creation that is self-aware when they can see a moving mouth producing the sounds it’s creating.
Instead of engineering a pair of animatronic lips, Burns, whose YouTube channel is dedicated to celebrating and exploring vintage electronics and technology, decided to repurpose a compact CRT television to display a waveform that correlates to the sounds of Alexa coming from a speaker. That’s obviously not how the human mouth works, but the results still accomplish the goal of providing a visual source for the smart assistant’s responses.
The small screen could have also been used to upgrade Alexa with a pair of engaging eyes. Despite featuring a fairly simple design, Anki’s Vector robot felt incredibly engaging thanks to a pair of animated eyes created by a Pixar artist. For their robot’s mouth, Burns turned to animatronics and 3D-printed a pair of animated eyes using Will Cogley’s design that relies on just six micro servo motors to create lifelike movements.
The final build sidelines aesthetic concerns for a retro-futuristic creation that looks like something either E.T. would have cobbled together in Elliott’s shed, or a grade school science fair project featured in an ‘80s after-school TV special that would eventually gain full sentience and try to take over the world. It’s not not creepy, but does manage to make Alexa feel a little more personable, especially thanks to the addition of a user-tracking sensor that allows the animatronic eyes to focus on the nearest user. But would I put this thing in charge of my smart home? Absolutely not.
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