PaPeRo Targets Bloggers, Sends Them to the Red Light District

PaPeRo is a project by NEC to create a personal assistant that packs as much power into a harmless-looking package as possible. Their hopes for this device are endless, from home automation to fetching your email like a dog with a newspaper and from babysitting the children to telling you were, when, and how to get to your appointments, this little R2D2 wannabe is the prototype for total robot ubiquity in human life. I can already picture the hacks.

The key to this little guy's power is NEC's large speech recognition vocabulary and natural language keyword searching. Now it appears they've made an attempt to use this to automate your blog for you (link). From the article:

"The features of the new system are as follows:

1. Chat with PaPeRo to create your daily blog. The speech contents of the video message are converted into text and extracted through large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition technology. Multi-media web contents matching the extracted keywords are then uploaded and edited on the user's blog, enabling effortless creation of a multi-media blog.
2. Natural language, text retrieval technology enables searching of Internet contents. Analyzing the syntactic relationship, such as direct objects and predicate verbs, the system calculates similarities between the text in the contents on the Internet and the video message text converted by a speech recognition engine (developed with a large database of spoken words). This allows searching and accurate location of multi-media contents suitable to the contents of the text message. "

If you make your money blogging this little guy will either make your life really easy, or more likely just replace you altogether. Just add a quirky wit emulator and it's got me cornered. Perhaps having foreseen this NEC is already working on the virtual PaPeRo in car navigation system. By the pictures I think they're trying to distract the bloggers with prostitutes.

Also, among other things, PaPeRo's "Fun game functions" are quite interesting:

Dances
mimicry (vacuum cleaner, pot, ramen noodles, motocycle, bicycle, bunny hop, space alien, etc.)
riddles
quizzes
a daruma doll fell down
poetry card guessing game
bomb game
Lock-on game (something like Asteroids)
nervous breakdown
fortune telling
roulette and others

You draw your own conclusions.

Thanks to Gizmodo