Why Facebook's plan to give virtual assistants bodies is both awesome and terrifying

Facebook recently showed off the progress its AI research team has made in the realm of household robotics. The dream is to take the virtual assistant out of the speaker and put it into an autonomous body capable of traversing your house. To accomplish a task like checking to see whether you locked the front door or retrieving a cell phone that's ringing in an upstairs bedroom, AI assistants of the future must learn to plan their route, navigate effectively, look around their physical environment, listen to what's happening around them, and build memories of the 3D space. Facebook's created a new system called SoundSpaces that gives robots the ability to interpret sounds. Current virtual assistants merely listen for wake words and then use natural language processing to interpret verbal commands as triggers. While the microphone array technology behind some of these assistants is impressive, they're merely designed to pick up voices in noisy environments.