Dephy's bionic footwear is a walking aid for people who want to be more active. Dephy's Sidekick, which the company describes as bionic footwear. I'll admit that I've always kind of taken walking for granted. Other than a knee injury more than a decade ago, my ability to walk long distances has largely been limited only by my own choices. And robotics company Dephy has created a pair of robotic sneakers, called the Sidekick, that are meant to help people who want to walk more than their bodies might otherwise be capable of.

Many enterprises are increasingly adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make internal processes more competitive and efficient. In response to public concern and new regulations for the ethical and responsible use of AI, implementing AI governance frameworks could help to integrate AI within organisations and mitigate associated risks. However, the rapid technological advances and lack of shared ethical AI infrastructures creates barriers to their practical adoption in businesses. This paper presents a real-world AI application at TVS Supply Chain Solutions, reporting on the experience developing an AI assistant underpinned by large language models and the ethical, regulatory, and sociotechnical challenges in deployment for enterprise use.

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices enable speech-based communication, but generating speech is not the only resource needed to have a successful conversation. Being able to signal one wishes to take a turn by raising a hand or providing some other cue is critical in securing a turn to speak. Experienced conversation partners know how to recognize the nonverbal communication an augmented communicator (AC) displays, but these same nonverbal gestures can be hard to interpret by people who meet an AC for the first time. Prior work has identified motion through robots and expressive objects as a modality that can support communication. In this work, we work closely with an AAC user to understand how motion through a physical expressive object can support their communication. We present our process and resulting lessons on the designed object and the co-design process. Augmented communicators (ACs) with motor disabilities that affect speech production may use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices to speak. AAC devices include picture or letter boards that people can point to or speech-generating devices people can use to compose messages.2 Commercial speech-generating AAC systems are currently only customizable at the word selection and speech production levels, and they do not yet support augmentations that can increase non-verbal communication. Nonverbal communication is key in helping regulate turn-taking, convey personality, and execute actions that increase social agency,12 all of which are current challenges for ACs.15, 22 For instance, ACs are compelled to respond within the synchronous timing constraints of in-person interactions even though they use an asynchronous text-based medium.10 ACs have to compose a message on their device using text and then they share their message with text-to-speech while a non-augmented conversation partner responds synchronously using speech without needing to compose a message. Prior work identified motion-based AAC as a viable and under-explored modality for increasing ACs' agency in conversation.21 We build on this prior-work to dig deeper into a particular case study on motion-based AAC by co-designing a physical expressive object, or sidekick, to support ACs during conversations.

In 2013, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted Prime Air, the company's then newly announced drone delivery unit, would be flying within four to five years. A decade later, the service appears to be no closer to reality than it was in 2018. However, some drone startups have had more success. Among those is Zipline, which says it's on track to complete about 1 million deliveries by the end of the year. By 2025, the company expects to operate more flights than most airlines, a feat it intends to accomplish thanks to its next-generation drone, the Platform 2 or P2 Zip. Zipline's latest drone consists of two autonomous vehicles that will work in unison with one another to deliver packages that weigh up to 8 pounds.

Creating reasonable AI for sidekicks in games has proven to be a difficult challenge synthetizing player modelling and cooperative planning, both being problems hard by themselves. In this paper, we experiment with designing around these problems: we propose a cooperative puzzle-platformer game that was designed to look similarly to the mainstream of the genre, but to allow for an easy implementation of a quality sidekick AI, letting us test player reactions to the AI. The game was designed so that it is easy for the AI to find optimal solutions while the problem is relatively hard for a human player. We gathered survey responses from players who played the game online (N 28). While the AI sidekick was reported as likeable and helpful, players still reported greater enjoyment of the game when they were allowed to control the sidekick themselves. These findings indicate that the AI itself is not the only obstacle to truly enjoyable gameplay with an AI sidekick.

Say what you will about Space Jam: A New Legacy, but Don Cheadle really goes for it. He threatens, he cajoles, he chews the scenery with the enthusiasm of a rabid guinea pig. Just fully cannonballs into the role of a spurned genius exacting revenge. In the context of a movie that is, let's say, not on the Criterion short list, Cheadle imbues his character with the sort of fragile humanity you wouldn't expect in a movie that features Porky rapping. Which would be great, except that he's playing lines of code.

Alexa wants to help your child learn how to read. With Amazon's new Reading Sidekick, kids can say "Alexa, let's read," to an Amazon Kids-enabled Echo device or the Amazon Kids app on a tablet and the artificial intelligence-powered assistant will take turns reading with them. An Amazon Kids subscription ($2.99 monthly) is required. Kids can choose from hundreds of physical and digital books that are supported, with more being added monthly. After asking Alexa to read with them, the AI assistant will ask how much do they want to read: a little, a lot, or taking turns.

As good as it is to read with your kids, you might not always be there when they want to open a book. Amazon thinks it can fill in that gap, though. It just rolled out a long-teased Reading Sidekick feature that uses an Echo Kids device to help your kids read aloud on their own time. Children just have to tell Alexa "let's read" to take turns reading supported books, whether they're digital or physical. Your young ones won't always have to wait for you, in other words.

This allows the user to "buy back" their time, and ensure their schedules are properly maintained, while eliminating human error from the process. The top 3 features of Sidekick are Forward to schedule, Inbound Link, and Availability Management. Forward to schedule allows users to forward any email that is a meeting request and Sidekick handles the rest! Using ML and NLP, Sidekick gathers all of the relevant data about the meeting request, and then schedules it with all participants. An inbound link delivers a solution for users to share access with Sidekick via chatbot.

Walmart (NYSE:WMT) has gone out of its way to promote its new in-store robots as tools that will free up its employees to do more tasks that involve interacting with customers, rather than as machines that will simply be taking people's jobs. It's a valid spin, to a point, but as the chain automates more functions, one has to wonder how long it will be before it decides it doesn't need quite so many people after all. For now, though, that's a question the retailer wants to sidestep; the most recent press release on the subject was focused on how useful robots can be to its employees. "Every hero needs a sidekick, and some of the best have been automated. Think R2D2, Optimus Prime, and Robot from Lost in Space. Just like Will Robinson and Luke Skywalker, having the right kind of support helps our associates succeed at their jobs," wrote Elizabeth Walker from Walmart Corporate Affairs.