Self-described “interactive innovation” agency TangibleFuture is crowdfunding for a package designed to show a smartphone into an ambulatory companion robotic — full with a hyperlink to OpenAI’s ChatGPT giant language mannequin for natural-language interplay.

“We started with a dream, that everybody who desires their very own robotic can afford one,” TangibleFuture’s Xiohui Zhang says of the mission’s origin. “LOOI transforms your telephone into a unusual cyber-creature by way of a magnetic connection, permitting him to come back to life like somewhat being from one other galaxy. With easy gestures, LOOI injects pleasure into each second, revolutionizing your desk presence in a single pleasant bundle. He’s your most entertaining and intimate companion.”

The LOOI robotic platform itself is a small wheeled robotic that includes contact sensors, impediment sensors, a time-of-flight (ToF) distance sensor, cliff sensors to forestall it wandering off an edge, and LED headlights with an RGB LED bar for extra flexibility. These aren’t the gadget’s major output, although: that is your present telephone, which connects to a magnetic mount level doubling as a Qi-compatible wi-fi charger.

“LOOI not solely enhances your major telephone’s capabilities but additionally offers your idle telephones a second life by remodeling them into vigorous desktop robots,” Zhang says of the potential for upcycling otherwise-unwanted smartphones. “This might be the best strategy to reuse outdated telephones at the moment.”

As soon as linked, LOUI makes use of the telephone as a show for animated eyes, the digicam for object monitoring, gesture recognition, and facial recognition, and for a rising variety of video games. To boost the robotic’s capabilities, TangibleFuture has linked the platform to OpenAI’s ChatGPT — that means it could reply to natural-language prompts, although on the threat of hallucinations and different surprising outputs.

The LOOI is now funding on Kickstarter with bodily rewards observing $119 for early chicken backers, a claimed 29 % low cost over the machine’s deliberate retail worth. All {hardware} is predicted to ship in August this yr, the corporate has mentioned.