Robots Technobabble

-Welcome to Technobabble.

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Please update your software to 2.0. Update is in progress.

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IN HIGH-PITCHED VOICE: Hello, and welcome to Techno...!

No, that's not right.

IN DEEP VOICE: Hello and wel...

HE LAUGHS

Oh, I like this one.

But no.

IN NORMAL VOICE: Hello and welcome.

Oh! Now this is better. I like this a lot.

It says intelligent, but approachable.

System rebooting.

CHEERING I'm back!

Come on!

Wowzers! I bet you can hardly believe it. I certainly can't.

Who'd give me a second series?

Coming up today...

New girl Lucy is here, and she's playing football - robot-stylee.

-Goal!

-LUCY LAUGHS

Aoife's back, and she's gone all competitive.

I guess I'll see you on the battlefield, if you're good enough.

And Niki and Sammy have joined the tech party

and are playing The Emoji Challenge.

-Sour, lemon? You're a lemon? You're an apple?

-You need the sound.

But, before any of that nonsense,

my lovely new boy Sam is here, and he's talking music apps.

Sam, go.

Hello there, people. I'm going to be showing you my favourite music apps

for your phone. So there's no way I'd be able to do this video

without first mentioning the iconic Shazam.

This is literally one of my favourite apps,

and is probably the app on my phone

I use the most. You know when you're at a party, on the dance floor,

you're doing your thing and you hear a song.

What do you do? Get your phone out and Shazam it.

By clicking on the Shazam button on your phone, your phone

will then listen to the music that is being played around you,

it'll find the name of the song and where you can get it from.

We now move on to Piano Free with Songs.

So if you're a musical genius like me

and you'd like to improve or maybe start learning

some piano skills on the move, then this app

is perfect for you. This app allows you to play the piano

to music that is provided within the app.

Sing Karaoke by Smule.

Small? Smule?

Now, I am actually banned from this app by my flatmates,

because, apparently, I'm just too good at singing

and they just have to get jealous of me.

-HE SINGS BADLY

-But, essentially, it is

a karaoke app that lets you see the lyrics to your favourite tracks.

In addition to this, you can invite your friends,

if they have the app, to come and sing a duet with you.

And that is all the apps we have time for.

Thank you so much for watching. I will see you all very soon.

Thanks, Sam. Hasn't he got lovely hair, viewers?

I've been thinking about a new 'do for a while now.

Do you think I'd suit Sam's style?

Anyone? Anyone?

OK, suit yourselves.

Technobabblers, while I have your attention,

let's just remind ourselves of that good old-fashioned rhyme.

Don't download an app without permission.

Otherwise you'll be in...

HE MUTTERS

Listen, you'll get in trouble, and no-one can be doing with that,

so don't do it. Just get permission!

Right, it's time to check my informator.

Oh, I don't like that at all.

What a terrible name. Who thought of it?

Oh, I did.

-THEY CHANT:

-Who are ya? Who are ya?

Who are ya? Who are ya?

Oi! Rascals, that's what you are.

Surely someone wants to ask something about tech?

In the future, will robots take our jobs?

Now, there's a question, Lucy, and something of a coincidence,

because I'm going to need a bit of help with this one.

Time to bring in the big guns. The big new guns.

The big new Lucy guns!

Looking good, Luce.

It's Lucy, actually, but thanks, Vlogster!

How can I help?

Do you fancy some lunch? There's a chippy around the corner.

Yeah, why not.

Really? I thought you'd say no.

Oh, I'll need to wash and find something to wear.

But first I need your help.

Go on, I'm listening.

I need you to find out some information

for one of our delightful babblers.

Great, well, I'll just get myself out of my kit and I'll head off.

Goodo!

You'll get a real kick out of this one!

Ah-ha-ha! "Kick", as in "kick a ball".

We're doing something football-related, right?

Oh, you got it. I thought I was being mysterious.

I'm sending Lucy to a university

to check out their football team - of robots!

She's going to meet up with Dr Daniel Polani, the team's founder,

to discover more about this interesting take on the sport.

So why robot football?

Robot football looks fun, but it's incredibly difficult to do,

when you actually have to explain to a robot how to do it.

So how do you get a robot to play football?

Well, that is a lot of work.

I mean, this team, for example, contains the work

of three years of coding, of writing software.

A team of around four people basically write the software

to make these robots do what they do,

because the first thing you have to do is recognise what's the ball.

So you see that as a blob - in our case the ball is still red.

So if you have a red shirt and you have, for example,

a kid sitting outside of the field with a red shirt,

you have to understand this kid is not the ball.

-LUCY LAUGHS

-It'll chase the kid!

Exactly, and that has happened.

So what happens during a live match, you know,

are programmers inputting data in real time, during the match,

or is it all pre-programmed?

Very good question,

because you are not allowed to do anything to the robots

while they are in the game.

So, basically, you can take a time out for the robots,

when you can fix stuff

but, when they are on the field, the only person

that can give a command to the robot is the referee,

saying start, stop, whatever.

Do you think this is the future of sport?

Well, it depends what the audience is.

Some audiences will be interested in doing sports themselves

and watching humans do it, of course.

Other audiences will be interested in the technological aspect.

So where do you see the future of robots in football?

The grand vision, of course, is, in 2050,

have a robot footballer team play against the world champions and win.

But, of course, the goal is to improve artificial intelligence,

to improve robotics.

Now, can I be a little bit cheeky. I fancy myself as a bit of a Beckham.

Please can I have a go?

Well, go ahead. Boot it like Beckham.

Ooh, he's fast, this one.

He just knocked me on the floor!

This way, this way.

That is so cool, the way he dribbles.

I'm setting you up for a goal here.

Goal!

LUCY LAUGHS

What do you think, Vlogster? Fancy a kickabout?

You might not have noticed, Lucy,

but I don't have any legs, so no.

But it does look like robots could soon replace humans

in all kinds of jobs.

First, meet Robear, a Japanese nursing-care robot.

Robear is designed to lift patients out of bed

and into a wheelchair.

With extending legs to stop from toppling over,

this bear bot can also support people who need help to stand up.

He's a gentle giant. What's next?

It's time to take out the trash.

A European team of techsperts has developed robots

to help with household chores.

Controlled using a tablet,

the domestic robot, apartment robot and outdoor robot work together

to complete jobs around the home, like putting the rubbish out.

Go on, amaze me.

Japanese shoppers of the future might get to meet AicoChihira.

Dressed in a kimono, smiling and helping with directions,

she's getting a tryout in a Tokyo department store,

but Aiko isn't your usual assistant.

She's a humanoid robot, who uses 43 motors to move and interact,

just like a real person.

I wonder if she could help me make some shopping decisions.

Right, Aoife, you're up next.

What you got, my Irish buddy?

If you've got a competitive streak, then these are the games for you.

If you love squids, and making a mess,

you're going to love Splatoon.

In Splatoon's main game mode, a four-versus-four battle

called Turf War, two teams battle it out

to cover as much of the map as possible

in their brightly coloured ink,

while making sure the other team doesn't, literally,

cover more ground in their colour.

While it's tempting, remember that in this mode

hunting down opponents on the other team doesn't net you extra points

at the end of the match, so it's best to just focus

on painting over every surface you can find.

Plants vs. Zombies have moved their battleground from the touchpad

to good old home consoles with Garden Warfare.

HE PLAYS BADLY

HE CHOKES

Though it's a mode based around helping other players

rather than fighting them,

you should start with a few rounds of Garden Ops

if you're new to the game.

It'll give you room to get to grips with the different classes,

as well as how best to cooperate and communicate with other players,

before you move on to a more competitive mode.

You can't go wrong with a little bit

of the unbelievably fun Towerfall Ascension.

"As our world crumbles and splits into chaos,

"the demons and monsters spread among us."

Up to four players go head-to-head in the tiny two-dimensional arenas,

where the aim is to use arrows to take out your enemies.

If your timing's perfect, you can snatch arrows out of the air

using the right trigger and send them back to whoever fired them.

Well, are you feeling lucky?

I guess I'll see you on the battlefield.

Thanks, Aoife. Whoa!

Some kind of warning wouldn't go amiss.

Will we always use money in the future?

Ker-ching!

Right on the money there, Benji.

Money has been changing hands for thousands of years,

but it hasn't always been coins and notes like today.

Lots of things, from sea-snail shells to chocolate,

have been used to pay for stuff.

Most current banknotes are made out of cotton paper,

but the Bank of England has announced it will soon replace ours

with plastic polymer versions, starting with the £5 note.

That'll definitely make it harder to blow me nose.

SNEEZING

The plastic notes are longer-lasting, harder to forge and won't fall apart

if you accidentally put them through the washing machine.

Across the UK, there is £57 billion of printed money in wallets,

cash machines and under mattresses.

But people are starting to use other ways to pay each other,

without the need for cash at all.

Sweden is likely to be the first cash-free country

in the world by 2030.

And Denmark is letting shops decide

if they take cash or not from next year.

Most new credit and debit cards now have...

IN POSH VOICE: ..near-field communication technology -

that's contactless to you and me - so you can pay for things

without even having to remember your PIN number.

Smartphones are using smart tech, too,

adding extra security by using biometrics,

like fingerprint recognition that identifies you from someone else.

Or facial scanning for online shopping,

where you confirm a payment on your phone just by blinking at the screen.

And then there's virtual money, crypto currencies,

like Bitcoins and Dogecoins,

which have never physically existed at all.

They're a digital currency that people can trade person to person,

and using phones or computers people can also pay for things

with these digital coins across the world,

as some shops are now starting to accept them.

Now, not last and not least, we have newbies to the Technobabble scene.

I present Niki and Sammy.

Boys, do your worst.

Hey, guys. So today we're going to do

a good old-fashioned vlog challenge. Niki, what are we going to do?

The Emoji Challenge.

So this one is all about getting the height

and spiralling it around...

-I already know who you are.

-Look.

-You're the poo emoji.

-PING!

-Poo emoji!

-Well, well done.

I guessed the emoji, but not through anything you did -

it was just brown.

It's my turn now. This one's super-simple.

You can see it, Sammy's going to get it in milliseconds.

-Sassy face?

-PING!

-It's the sass?

-Yeah.

-It's, like, the sassy girl.

Three, two, one.

Er, hungry? Burger? You're eating a burger?

You are a hamster. You're a mouse.

-No!

-You are...

-shouting?

-It's still...

-You're...

It's the shock-expression emoji with the blue face.

-PING!

-That's what I did!

-No, that'd be...

No. That's what I did!

-You went...

-I went...

-Here we go. Here we go.

-HE POUTS

Er, sour? Lemon? You're a lemon?

-You're an apple?

-You need the sound.

HE POUTS

Ew.

Er, you are a fish. Fish? You're a fish?

Fish? You're a fish? You're a fish?

It's the blowing kiss emoji.

-PING!

-Right, right.

I got that. I was very close to having that one.

I hope that inspires you guys to go and let loose your inner emoji.

Don't be afraid to let it be a bit sassy, too.

Go and practise those faces.

Ha! Don't they look similar?

Anyone would think they were twins.

But we all know they don't exist.

Finally, it's time for a new section of the show called...

Babblebuster!

HE SINGS # It's Babble...Babblebuster! #

Join in the chorus!

# Babble, babble. #

Oh. That's right.

Come with me as we go on a fact-finding mission

to discover the coolest words in tech.

F is for Firewall.

Not, as you might think,

a death-defying circus act performed by the Flaming Satsuma Brothers.

A firewall is a security programme that protects your computer

against attacks from the outside world.

The firewall controls everything coming in

and going out of your computer, to and from the Internet,

to keep nasty viruses and programs out.

Right, that's it for today.

A triumphant return, if I do say so myself.

I'm loving being back! Cheery-bye.

Next time on Technobabble...

Me old pal Marcus is here, and he's brewing up a cup of coffee power.

I'm going to name this "the Marcus coffee."

Lizzie will be giving us some of her favourite Minecraft tips.

Today, I'm going to be showing my top five tips

on how to play the game even better.

Adam's here, and he's animated.

Hello, and welcome to Technobabble.