New AI Named Gabriel Can Whisper Instructions into Your Ear

Fittingly named after the angel Gabriel who usually takes on the role of God’s messenger in most biblical writings, the outstanding artificial intelligence platform that I’m about to describe was developed by a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. Actually, “Gabriel” is more of a robotic assistant that was designed to whisper various instructions into your ear, such as building a simple Lego object, for example. However, we’ve been informed that the project’s aim is much more ambitious than that, as it hopes to ensure wearable cognitive assistance to people suffering from brain injuries, Alzheimer’s or other neurodegenerative problems.

To clarify, if an Alzheimer’s patient ends up forgetting the name of a relative or a friend, Gabriel can provide a very useful reminder. Naturally, in order for the device to work properly, it will need to be mounted on some sort of wearable device, and for now, the team behind its creation is using Google Glass for a number of demos. Below you will find a video in which a ping-pong player receives AI assistance and manages to improve his game by hitting the ball left or right depending on his opponent’s position. The research project received $2.8 million in funding, and it mainly relies on cloudlets, which allow a user to take advantage of the computing power of the nearest device instead of sending information to a distant server. Due to their incredible significance, these cloudlets were named after another biblical character, Elijah.