Okay, Spot's Pas de Bourrée Couru is pretty good.
From The Verge, October 26:
The company used ChatGPT to train its four-legged bot to answer questions and generate responses about its facilities.
We saw Spot run, jump, and even dance... but now we can see Spot talk. In a somewhat unsettling video posted by Boston Dynamics, we see its robot dog outfitted with a top hat, mustache, and googly eyes as it chats with staff members in a British accent, taking them on a tour of the company’s facilities.
“Shall we commence our journey?” Spot asks. “The charging stations, where Spot robots rest and recharge, is our first point of interest. Follow me, gentlemen.” As shown in the demo, Spot is capable of answering questions and even opens its “mouth” to make it seem like it’s actually speaking.
To make Spot “talk,” Boston Dynamics used OpenAI’s ChatGPT API, along with some open-source large language models (LLM) to carefully train its responses. It then outfitted the bot with a speaker, added text-to-speech capabilities, and made its mouth — er... gripper — mimic speech “like the mouth of a puppet.”....
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Inside every Spot the Dog is a stone-cold killer.
From The Drive's The Warzone vertical, October 18 (note, not a Boston Dynamics product):
Marines Test Fire Robot Dog Armed With Rocket Launcher
A rocket launcher-toting robot dog could give Marines a valuable new way to remotely attack armored vehicles, especially in urban areas.
The U.S. Marine Corps recently tested a robot dog toting a training version of the M72 infantry anti-armor rocket launcher. This is the latest example of growing interest in the U.S. and foreign militaries forces, especially the Chinese and Russian armed forces, in the idea of arming four-legged uncrewed ground systems. In fact, the Marine design looks to be based on a similar, if not identical Chinese-made commercial-of-the-shelf quadrupedal robot that has emerged in anti-armor rocket launcher and submachine gun-armed configurations in Russia in the past.
Members of the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command's (MAGTFC) Tactical Training and Exercise Control group (TTECG), based at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms in California, tested the robot dog back in September. Members of the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) were also involved in what was described as a proof-of-concept demonstration....
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