Abhishek Singh graduated from NYU’s ITP program and clearly he learned a lot about the future of computing. During his tenure there he quickly fell in love with hardware startups and, with a little grit and programming work, he created Peeqo , a robot that responds only in GIFs. That’s right: this is a robot that replies only in animated video clips.
God help us.
“I’ve always been fascinated by robots and I built this as part of my thesis at ITP. One of the reasons I wanted to build this bot was because I feel a lot of the conversation on social robotics today centers around their inability to express emotion or to be relatable,” he said. “I love GIFs as much as every other person and they’ve become a universal language of sorts on the internet and beyond, capable of depicting almost anything from emotion to information. Often a GIF just says it better.”
Like R2-D2’s cheeps and chirps, Peeqo has a limited human vocabulary but is a surprisingly rich communicator.
