Cannes Lions 2017: Meet Olly the robot

Will 2017 finally be the year of the robot? Former advertising executive Chelsea Chen, co-founder of Emotech and the creator of Olly set out to answer that question, in a session that featured her creation, Olly.

 

Chen put forth all the immense possibilities that were possible with robots around. First, most of the current bots were created to give you a similar set of answers to a pattern of queries that were fed into them. There was a large potential to create bots who were learning consistently about the family where they lived (it’s created primarily for the end-consumer) and made their lives easier.

 

Bots could be trained to understand emotions and react accordingly. Did Olly also have mood swings? Chen says that he’s been trained to rather understand and deal with our moods.

 

 

The other important point about Olly was the diversity of its creators. Emotech has about 30-odd employees, but they come from 22 different cultures and can also speak their respective native languages. This was extremely important, according to Chen, in creating a bot that had universal appeal.  

 

While robots might learn from their creators and likewise, there would soon ecosystem of robots that could learn from each other.

 

Would Olly speak multiple languages? “As of now he speaks only English, but in the near future he will be conversant with two more languages,” says Chen. What will these languages be? As of now, mum’s the word.