Edouard Normand shows off his idea for you next practice assistant

Taking pride of place in Silmo Paris’ “Next” area this year was a cute robot - well the face design on the monitor was cute - from Paris-based artificial creature design company Spoon.ai. Business development manager Edouard Normand says one day robots with faces could replace information touch screens and other technological “interpreters” across a wide range of organisations to vastly improve customer engagement and their interactive experience.

While other artificial intelligence (AI) technology developers focus on semantics – the voice and information provided – Spoon is focusing on the face of their technology, he says. “We as humans have a face and we need that face to express emotions… We need the right interpreters to interact instinctively and the most instinctive way to interact is giving the user the sensation that he exists in the eye of the machine, so that we interact with them.”

It’s not the machine that it’s important, continues Normand, it’s what it induces in the user. “We want to induce emotional behaviours that enable you to feel as though the machine actually cares about you.”

Currently, Spoon’s robot is in the experimental phase, with the one on show at Silmo a prototype designed to build awareness for Spoon’s concept and attract development partners. Optics is an attractive industry for Spoon because of its high-tech mirror technology, which could incorporate more digital elements that could provide feedback and encourage further engagement, says Normand. “[Our robots] are a new generation of interface. Because today you need HMIs [human machine interfaces] to be more welcoming and more reassuring.”