NEW DELHI: With a smartphone strapped to her head, Indian housewife Nagireddy Sriramyachandra films herself slicing mangoes to train AI-powered robots to take on household jobs in the future.
Earning just over two dollars for an hour of video, her mundane recordings are invaluable for global tech companies teaching machines how to move like humans in the real world.
The 25-year-old is one of a growing army of thousands of AI system trainers in the world’s most populous country.
“Who else will give you 250 rupees an hour just for doing housework?” said Sriramyachandra from her kitchen in Chennai in Tamil Nadu.
“I may get a robot myself in the future,” she added.
Artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators crunch reams of digital data, but building systems to navigate real-life environments is more challenging.
Developers think feeding first-person footage, called “egocentric data”, into specialised AI models will help robots copy humans.
Some AI trainers work at home, others in factories or specialised studios — using video glasses, head-mounted cameras and motion sensors.
Artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators crunch reams of digital data, but building systems to navigate real-life environments is more challenging.
Developers think feeding first-person footage, called “egocentric data”, into specialised AI models will help robots copy humans.
Some AI trainers work at home, others in factories or specialised studios — using video glasses, head-mounted cameras and motion sensors.
“It blares ‘hands not detected’ when I’m not recording properly,” said Sriramyachandra, who sends recordings via a special app to the AI data company Objectways.
The firm, which has offices in India and the United States, lists Fortune 500 multinationals as clients. It works with Amazon SageMaker, a platform for machine learning models.
The humanoid robot market is booming, with investment bank Morgan Stanley predicting there could be over a billion in use by 2050, mostly for industrial and commercial purposes.
“Folding clothes, coffee making… cooking a very specific thing, sandwich making,” Objectways head Ravi Shankar said, listing videos requested by clients.
“Some jobs are supposed to be taken over, so humans can go and do better things.”
In India, the emerging field of spatial AI is providing new employment — for now.
The 50-year-old CEO is US-based but hires workers from Tamil Nadu, where he grew up, one of India’s international technology hubs.
At a Karur textile factory, busy with workers attaching labels to caps and ironing cloth bags, AFP saw eight people wearing head cameras and smart glasses supplied by Objectways.
