Chinese robotics and artificial intelligence startup Xuanyuan Technology, also known as X-Origin, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a home companion robot linked to OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language model — promising a device that can carry out conversations, act as a tutor, or even provide a “mental health evaluation” for its users: Yonbo.
“Yonbo mimics human perceptions, growing and evolving through continuous interactions,” the company claims of its creation. “Powered by a Consistency Personalized Large Language Model (CLLM), the more you engage with Yonbo, the deeper his understanding becomes, transforming him into your uniquely personalized companion. Yonbo sees, hears, and thinks like a real companion. With a high-resolution camera, he recognizes people, objects, and his surroundings. A four-microphone array enables precise directional hearing, so he knows who’s speaking and where the sound is coming from.”
The Yonbo itself is a compact four-wheeled robot powered by an unnamed single-board computer with four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.9GHz, 4GB of LPDDR4X memory, and 32GB of eMMC 5.1 storage. If that doesn’t sound like enough to run the kind of language model Xuanyuan is promising, it isn’t: the company’s design uses a speech-recognition engine running locally then transmits the results to OpenAI as a customized prompt for its ChatGPT large language model to process.
This, the company claims, can act as a tutor or even a “mental health assistant” using “30+ psychological assessment tools and 20+ guidance models” — though it has not disclosed how it plans to deal with the inevitable “hallucination” errors endemic to large language model technology.
Elsewhere on the robot is a five megapixel camera and four-microphone array, a 320×960-resolution display acting as animated “eyes”, two two-watt amplified speakers, and a 5Ah battery good for a claimed 3.5 hours of operation per one-hour charge. The company has also unveiled two accessories: the Mini Yonbo AI Camera, a compact handheld featuring similar capabilities but aimed at 4-8 year old users, and a wristband for remote-controlling the robot’s movement.
The company’s crowdfunding campaign is currently live on Kickstarter , starting at $399 for early bird backers — a claimed 61 percent discount over the planned retail price. All hardware is expected to ship in August this year, but as with all crowdfunding campaigns fulfillment is not guaranteed — and it’s not clear how the company plans to cover the ongoing costs of LLM usage without passing a subscription fee on to its backers.