Tencent, China’s biggest social media and IM platform, has launched a cute, talking, wiggling, voice-recognizing ‘Qrobot’ in the form of its well-known QQ penguin mascot.
The voice-controlled, USB-powered Qrobot can understand verbal commands and queries – upon touching the little penguin’s head, to ready it for input – and give back information in a variety of voices, including a cutesy, child-like tone.
Qrobot’s eyes also serve up some relevant data, such as weather or stocks, in luminescent blue text, although you’ll have to squint pretty hard to read it, by the looks of how tiny the text is. Usually, the Qrobot’s eyes are just being purely expressive, in a cartoonish way.
"Exterminate! Exterminate!" Oh, wait... I'm thinking of a different robot.
Other movements include head-nodding and wing-flapping, depending on what kind of information it’s relaying to you. Its white chest sometimes illuminates with red, white and blue lights. Its base stand includes speakers, so you can play music through it too (see the video below).
Tencent is selling these Qrobots for 1,188 RMB (US$185), and is aiming to initially sell 5,000 of them. That’s not a very large robot army to ship out, but perhaps Tencent feels not too many people will be willing to pay so much for a fairly pricey toy. The gadget is usable only with Windows PCs, with Tencent providing the necessary drivers on a CD-ROM in the box.
To make it more social, the robo-penguin has its own Tencent Weibo account. Keeping it all in-house, the gadget is available to buy only on Tencent’s own e-commerce site, Paipai.
It’d be interesting to see Tencent try to integrate this voice-recognition technology in something more practical in the future – perhaps integrated into its QQ suite of IM and social gaming apps.
On a related note, Tencent released its Q2 2011 figures yesterday, showing the Chinese giant missed its earnings targets. Earlier today my colleague asked whether less people are now using QQ for chatting and gaming.
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