Here’s how you can end up with a chatty robot sales assistant – OSHbot!

With automation as goal for all possible human tasks, a lot of people are going unemployed. Yet more people employ themselves in finding these intelligent machines. In the retailing industry, automation has already been established in billing, scanning and store mapping sections. There are digital helpers to find items that we are looking for in the form of Apps. Now, we are going to focus on what will throw store assistants out of job.

Silicon Valley based Fellow Robots have joined with Lowe’s Innovation Labs to create the awesome human-sized robotic store associates. They’re one of a kind customer service bots. They have all the technology they would need to assist a person who is looking for something in a store. The OSHbot has been trialed at Lowe’s hardware store resulting in success and popularity.

These robots employ a multitude of technologies to function the way they do. The bot is interfaced with two touch-screens interactive displays that can show text  / pictures and also allow people to choose the options it displays. When it has no one to attend to, these screens display promotions and advertisements. It also has a 3-D scanner so it can scan the object and direct the customers with location-based information to relevant or similar items.

OSHbot is equipped with the famous automobile technology of collision detection to ride smoothly on the shop’s floor. It is fitted with sensors to do the same and to sense the customer. It also uses body and voice sensing technologies to help customers. With Natural Language Processing, they can understand and interact with the customers in a variety of languages. They can easily detect the customers who seek help and can continuously sense their body so they can navigate at a comfortable pace.

Surely these bots won’t be limited to hardware stores, they’ll move out to perhaps grocery stores, departmental stores or even the dressing and accessory sector. For all I know, they may become the friend that you walk in parallel with in every daily aspects of life.