Buddy the Robot powered by Agora’s Real Time Engagement Platform Helps Children Learn Remotely
Blue Frog Robotics, the creator of Buddy, powered by Agora, Inc. (NASDAQ: API) a pioneer and leading platform for real-time engagement APIs, is exhibiting at the British Educational Training and Technology Show (BETT) in London March 23-25th at booth NK 31 in the French Pavilion.
The highly personable, adorable Buddy offers real-time engagement (RTE) services to recreate social relations while enhancing the quality of life at any age. From early childhood education to eldercare, Buddy is there to either help a child learn or serve as a guardian to a senior citizen.
In an educational context, Buddy is an emotional support robot used for childhood education, for hospitalized children, and students attending school remotely. In addition, Buddy can serve as a teaching assistant, a student’s learning companion, and an essential teaching tool for coding and programming.
“Agora’s real-time-engagement technology has made Buddy very robust and reliable through its telepresence function. It’s providing a more human-to-human connection that helps preserve important social connections for children to reduce a sense of isolation. We couldn’t be more pleased to partner with Blue Frog Robotics helping children, parents and teachers connecting remotely through Buddy,” said Ali Nhari, Head of Sales at Agora.
Blue Frog leverages artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, natural language processing, and gesture controls to enable the most user-friendly experience. Agora’s Real-Time Engagement technology enables optimal Quality of Service (QoS), a robust and reliable video call solution with the highest visibility in call quality between the user, the robot, and the tablet user.
France’s Ministry of National Education recently purchased 1750 Buddy robots to help homebound or hospitalized children remotely interact with their peers in classrooms. Buddy allows children affected by serious and long-term illnesses to be “tele-present,” to participate in class activities as if they were physically there interacting with their environment.
“Not only do the children participate in all teaching activities, but they can also interact with their environment. Tele-presence robots allow them to move, exchange and establish their presence within the schools, which they continue to attend physically,” said Jean-Michel Blanquer, France’s Minister of Education.
The Toulouse University Hospital has found Buddy to be a valuable addition to children undergoing treatment in isolation rooms. With real-time video and AI technology Buddy helps children feel emotionally connected to others.
“Buddy has a real, impactful presence, a socio-physiological effect on the child and siblings. The robot reduces the feeling of distance and exclusion from family during these challenging times for the child and family members,” said Cécile Boulanger, Pediatrician at Toulouse University Hospital.
“From day one our goal is to make advanced robotic technologies and life-enhancing robots that are affordable in favor of useful services and richer interactions with loved ones. Make Robots-for-Good a reality, this is our mission. Our collaboration with Agora makes it possible to provide our robots to consumers worldwide as we can guarantee robustness and reliability of the communications which is for us a crucial point when your product is meant TO create social link. Lastly, we want everyone to adopt Buddy to connect, assist, entertain, educate, and make everybody smile,” said Rodolphe Hasselvander, Founder at Blue Frog Robotics.
A video presentation of Buddy can be found here.