Aren’t pets such a drag? I mean, really. They’re all furry, and cute, and innocent. And you have to feed them and love them, and respect their autonomy and basic needs. For what? Borderline unconditional love? Who’s got time for all that? Certainly not me. My job is computer, and I need efficiency—a practical companion that’s alive when I want it to be and shutting the f**k up when I need to have the TPS report filed by EOD so corporate can circle back on the EOY roadmap. You got all that? Me neither; I’ll just have AI summarize it for me. Alright, sorry, I’m done joking now. It’s time to get serious—or should I say… Sirius.
Sirius is a $1,200 robot dog made by a company you’ve never heard of called Hengbot. It’s part of a long lineage of robot dogs punctuated by the likes of tech titans like Sony, Xiaomi, Fisher-Price, and, uh, Ideal Toy Company’s impeccably named mechanical dog from 1960, Gaylord the Pup (you can’t make this shit up, folks). But this isn’t just another Gaylord. It’s a robot dog with—say it with me now—AI. Using large language models (LLMs) like the ones that power ChatGPT, Sirius comes equipped with the ability to understand voice commands. What can you ask Sirius? Some stuff.
Hengbot Sirius Robot Dog Pros Dog-like movement
Dog-like movement AI for natural language prompts
AI for natural language prompts Game controller-compatible Cons Falls way too much
Falls way too much Connectivity issues
Connectivity issues Voice commands are spotty
Voice commands are spotty Not very cute
In a demo with Sirius, I saw the dog take voice commands like “sit,” “shake,” and “pee,” though I wouldn’t want to train your real dog to do that last one. They’re activated pretty much how you’d think they would be. Just blurt out, “Hey, Sirius,” and then talk away. The dog has to be connected to Wi-Fi to do all of this stuff, FYI—there’s no onboard processing, but this ain’t an iPhone after all. Speaking of iPhones, be careful when yelling “Hey, Sirius” because “Sirius” sounds an awful lot like another voice assistant, who’s had a bit of trouble with AI lately. I don’t know what happens when you ask your iPhone to pee, but frankly, I’d rather not find out.
I wasn’t able to test the voice commands with my review unit of Sirius because I had trouble connecting it to Wi-Fi, but I did get to see them in a live demo, and Sirius’s voice assistant looks about as good as Apple’s, which is to say… pretty mid. It recognized some commands right away, and others not so much. However mid Sirius is at processing and understanding voice commands, it’s much worse at (sigh) walking. This thing falls kind of a lot, and unlike a dog made of flesh and blood, it cannot figure out how to get up after taking said spill. Lots of my time testing Sirius was spent extricating it from the insufferable foibles of its own clumsiness. I have my own foibles to suffer, thank you very much. I don’t need a robot dog to add to the pile.
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