If you've used a smart voice assistant such as Alexa, Siri and whatever-Google's-smart-assistant-is-called, you'll probably have noticed that the tech is getting smarter every day. Google can wait on hold for you, Siri can speak in a gender-neutral voice and Alexa can read you bedtime stories in your dead grandmother's voice. Robotics is evolving in leaps and bounds as well, as we explored in our Robotics event last month. The gap between the two -- voice commands and autonomous robotics -- has been vast, for a number of reasons. Last week, we went to Google's robotics labs in Mountain View to see how that's set to change in the near future.

Teaching robots what to do for repetitive tasks in controlled spaces where humans aren't allowed isn't easy, but it's more or less a solved problem. Rivian's recent factory tour was a great reminder of that, but the use of industrial robotics is everywhere in manufacturing.

General-purpose robots that are able to solve lots of different tasks based on voice commands in spaces where humans also exist, is a lot harder. You might say, "But what about Roomba," but everyone's favorite robo-vacuum is generally programmed to avoid touching things other than the floor, and whatever's on the floor -- much to some owners' chagrin.

Table tennis is a game where the robot can easily self-determine whether a task was successful and learn from its mistakes. Here, one of the robotics researchers at Google is taking a break, showing the robot what's what. Image Credits: Haje Kamps (opens in a new window) / TechCrunch(opens in a new window)

"You may wonder why ping-pong. One of the big challenges in robotics today is this intersection of being fast, precise and adaptive. You can be fast and not adaptive at all; that's not a problem. That's fine in an industrial setting. But being fast and adaptive and precise is a really big challenge. Ping-pong is a really nice microcosm of the problem. It requires precision and speed. You can learn from people playing: it's a skill that people develop by practicing," Vincent Vanhoucke, Distinguished Scientist and head of robotics at Google Research told me. "It's not a skill where you can read the rules and become a champion overnight. You have to really practice it."