The future looks like a symphony of voice-controlled humanoid robots cleaning up after you.
1X revealed the latest update to its Eve robot showing a small crew understanding a request to tidy up an office, linking together tasks like cleaning up a coffee spill, picking up a hoodie off the floor, and delivering drinks. This is the closest we’ve seen to a robot butler, and on top of that, it’s a whole gang of them. See for yourself in 1X’s demo.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen humanoid robots understand and complete a task when asked in a more conversational tone, but several of them working together to accomplish a common goal is fairly novel.
Run Up to 15 Robots at Once
According to 1X, the Eve runs off a “voice-controlled natural language interface” that can chain commands together. That’s much more useful than robots that can only do one task at a time, especially since the Eve robots can understand complex goals with multiple steps. This may sound easy to a human, but 1X explains that chained commands introduce a lot of nuance for robots. The first task may be straightforward, but Eve has to consider the random position it ends up in after completing the first task, before starting the second, which will repeat for any follow-up tasks.
Even more impressive, you can run a fleet of up to 15 Eve robots. The demo only showed a handful, but the robots know how to work in tandem thanks to its neural network, similar to what Tesla uses for its EVs. All of that comes in a six-foot, two-inch robot that can run for up to six hours, run up to 9 mph, and carry up to 33 lbs. Plus, you can control the Eve robots remotely.
Adding Vision Language Models
We’re already impressed with Eve’s capabilities in the latest demo, but 1X has plans to improve the humanoid robot with the latest advances in AI. According to 1X, the next steps will have Eve upgraded with vision-based language models, like the ones we recently saw with GPT-4o or Google’s Project Astra. Considering how effective ChatGPT and Google’s models already are, AI vision could give Eve even more fluidity and autonomy.
As goofy as Eve looks, 1X has also been working on Neo, another robot that looks more approachable and will be designed to be more of a personal assistant. Luckily, 1X said that Eve’s design will serve as the foundation for how Neo learns, so we can expect the more refined sibling to be just as smart.
