Robots often play the role of running errands for humans in science fiction movies, but now the idea of errand robots has become a reality.

Savioke Robotics will help hotel attendants at its Cupertino, Silicon Valley, Aloft. SaviOne will deliver items like a toothbrush or bottled water to guests in four minutes when they need them.

Steve Cousins, Founder and CEO of Savioke, sat down with Tencent during the Great Wall Congress mobile World Conference in San Francisco.

He revealed that more robots will be deployed to more hotels next year. SaviOne’s main function is to find its way around and deliver things to people. But that’s just one of the many possibilities for the robot.

Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, its research and development products include information robot, editing robot, writing robot and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.

Stevkerson is the former CEO of Willow Garage, a robotics center in Silicon Valley. Willow garage has developed the PR2 robot, which is primarily used for academic research, and the open source Robotic operating system (ROS), but Stevkson and some of his staff want to build robots for commercial use.

He thinks a $400,000 robot might be academically provocative, but impractical in the real world.

‘Home and factory scenarios may not be appropriate,’ he says. ‘Finding a place for expensive robots may be the first answer.’

SaviOne can safely deliver items to guests in under four minutes

The following is the interview transcript of Tencent Technology:

Tencent Technology: Robots are the hottest topic these days, but there are many different areas. Why did you choose service robots as your research area?

Stevkerson: We thought we wanted to build a robot that could be useful to humans, but we found that it wasn’t ideal for us to use it in a home or a factory. Because there’s a lot of menial work at home, there’s not a lot of repetitive work, so you have to build robots that are really cheap and can actually do the job, but that might only be done once or twice a day. There’s a lot of repetitive work compared to a factory, but you already have a lot of automation, so the new robots may have some impact on the factory, but overall it’s not going to have any impact on human history, nobody cares. Service robots are on the scale of factories, but robots are rare.

Tencent Technology: When I first heard about the use of robots in hotels to serve guests, my first reaction was novelty, but I also remembered that hotel service workers have long fought for their job rights. So are robots taking jobs from them?

Steve Kerson: There are two answers to that question. One is: with any technology, you increase productivity, but you also change what you do. The robot’s responsibility is to take away some of the boring and repetitive work and let humans do more creative work. Hotel attendants have more important brains than robots and are able to perform many different kinds of delicate tasks.

With the robot, it only takes 20 seconds for the attendant to put something into the robot, but if you do make the trip, it takes at least seven to ten minutes. That’s time I could use for other, more important things. Like our partnership with Aloft, they’re not reducing staffing. They’re raising the quality of service.

Guests no longer have to wait for an attendant to be available to deliver something to their room, reducing the average wait time from 15 minutes to four minutes. We are targeting mid-priced hotels that would otherwise be too expensive to provide these services. For Aloft, they don’t offer in-room dining. If guests are hungry, they can help themselves downstairs to the front desk, but you still need to change into going out clothes. Even if you ordered room service, even if you just opened the door you might still have to change your clothes, but now that you’re dealing with a robot, you probably don’t need to.

Tencent technology: robots have cameras and sensors, so there is no way for customers to know when the robot is shooting, and what kind of photos or videos are taken. If customers may be undressed at that time, they may be taken indecent photos or videos, but they do not know. What do you think of this problem?

Mr. Stevkerson: We take privacy very seriously, including what photos we take and what we do with them. I definitely don’t want to see pictures taken by robots on the Internet, especially incriminating ones. So the robot will not enter the room and will never post the video. If you don’t wear clothes in the hallway, may also have a mobile phone and other guests take pictures or video on the Internet, this is the private sector to expand into the public domain, there is no way we can control others may see pictures, but we will never put the robot camera taken by any picture or video spread out.

Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment. No one would dispute that attention is one of the scarcest, most valuable and most rationally utilized resources in this age of information fragmentation. Relying on the independently developed Giiso engine, the Zhisou team created the first intelligent media platform Tianzexun APP, which can intelligently answer users’ various relevant information according to various commands or text interaction commands. And can be based on the user’s personalized use characteristics and continuous learning, continuous tracking of users interested in the unique content. At present, the day smart news APP6.0 version has been updated iteration, can be used to download the application market.

Tencent Technology: Besides delivering things to guests in hotels, what else can this robot do?

Steve Kerson: The main function of this robot is navigation, knowing where to go, getting from one place to another, being able to safely not run into anyone or get lost, that’s the basic function. We started with delivering things, because that’s the fundamental thing, and hopefully with my robotics team we can do the best indoor navigation that’s safe and documented, so other people can build on that.

And in hospitals, disinfecting rooms is a big problem. Like in the operating room or when a patient has a highly infectious disease like Ebola, the current technology is ultraviolet light, and they turn on this very bright light in the room for 20 minutes to kill all the viruses and bacteria in the room. In order to ensure effectiveness, the hospital will set the brightness to the highest level, which is also harmful to people, so all the doors and Windows will be closed, the curtains will be drawn, and the timer will be set. When the time is up, they will enter the room and move to the next room that needs to be disinfected.