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IBM is a community of makers, creators and thinkers. By nature we’re a curious group of people – always asking questions about what’s next, and within my team, what else is possible with artificial intelligence. We love teaming up with others who are passionate about the possibilities of technology, whether it be inspiring a new hit song, creating the scariest movie trailer, or helping businesses make better decisions.

The idea of joining forces with other makers, creators and thinkers to explore the potential of Watson, in a fun and easy way, was the catalyst behind a new project our team is launching: TJBot.

In the spirit of the maker community, TJBot is a DIY kit that allows you to build your own programmable cardboard robot powered by Watson. It consists of a cardboard cutout (which can be 3D printed or laser cut), Raspberry Pi and a variety of add-ons – including a RGB LED light, a microphone, a servo motor, and a camera. Most excitingly – TJBot is an open-source project with instructions available on Instructables.com and GitHub. While the team at IBM has provided three starter-sets of instructions (recipes) for bringing TJBot to life, we’re asking all of you to contribute your own instructions to inspire your fellow makers.

Today, we’ve created recipes to:

TJBot is an example of ‘embodied cognition’ – the idea of embedding artificial intelligence into objects in our everyday lives. While in this case we’re putting Watson technologies into a cardboard cutout, imagine these types of capabilities in your walls, in your furniture or in objects in your home.

One of the key facets of creating cognitive objects is understanding the way in which humans will, and want to, interact with them. Interactions with these objects – like TJBot – can be more natural than with existing computing devices; instead of typing on a keyboard, you use voice commands.

Whether you spend your days coding the next “big idea”, or simply playing with code for your school project, we invite you and the global community of makers to meet TJBot and join us in building the future of AI. We look forward to seeing the videos, blogs, recipes and photos published by the Maker community to see what, and how, you create your own cognitive objects.

Want to get your own TJBot? Visit our GitHub page for more information. Be sure to use #TJBot when sharing your creations on social media!