What’s nice about Amazon’s new drone patent is the prospect of having a little chat with your aerial-delivery vehicle when it’s dropping off your new camera.
What’s not so nice is Amazon’s recognition that drones carrying consumer goods are going to be falling out of the sky.
The Seattle e-commerce giant received a patent Aug 29 for drones, aka unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could “conduct a speech dialogue with a nearby person in order to request information and/or answer questions.”
In these days of artificially intelligent virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, it’s not surprising to see the company working toward a drone that could, as the patent envisions, ask a person to “please stay away” from a delivery-drop zone, or to “ask a person to identify themselves prior to releasing the product at the delivery destination” or even to allow the customer to “ask the UAV to postpone delivery” …
The Star | Sept. 4, 2017
