Buddy the Robot powered by Agora's Real Time Engagement
Platform Helps Children Learn Remotely
LONDON, March 22, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.
About Agora
Agora is the leading Real-time Engagement Platform as a Service
(RTE PaaS) company. Agora's mission is to make real-time engagement
ubiquitous, allowing everyone to interact with anyone, in any
application, anytime and anywhere. Agora's platform provides
developers with simple, flexible, and powerful application
programming interfaces, or APIs, to embed real-time video and voice
engagement experiences into their applications.
About Blue Frog Robotics
Founded in 2014 in France by the
robotics pioneer Rodolphe
Hasselvander, the start-up Blue Frog Robotics, pioneer and
leader in social robotics creates "Robots for Good" that
embody Emotional AI to drive significant positive impact on major
social issues: Education, Inclusion of vulnerable people and Ageing
population.
Photo -
https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1770950/Buddy_Kids.jpg
Logo -
https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/240347/agora_inc_logo.jpg