Here's a little taste of what it's like to interact with the OSHbot. (Video: Jennifer Hahn)

SAN JOSE, Calif. — How do you know that your customer service robot is still very much a work in progress? When it requires a human attendant to help.

Less than two months ago, home-improvement chain Lowe’s introduced its new OSHbot with a lot of fanfare and even earned itself a few jabs on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

But at the OSHbot’s first in-store, real-world demonstration on Tuesday at an Orchard Supply Hardware (or OSH, a subsidiary of Lowe’s) store in the heart of Silicon Valley, it couldn’t parse Ars’ very first query: "I’m looking for Phillips head screwdrivers."

OSHbot heard the words and displayed them on-screen: "Phillips head screw drivers," using two words for the common "screwdriver." Once the attendant deleted the space between those two words, it pulled up a myriad of screwdrivers that were in stock.

"The speech recognition [on the OSHbot] tries to pull out what it thinks are the key components," explained Kyle Nel, the director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs, the company’s research and development wing, which launched last year. "But then it has to match that to its database. It pulled apart as two words, which means it didn’t find it."

Once that glitch was taken care of, the OSHbot located the screwdrivers on a floor plan of the store and even offered to escort me to that section. I leisurely strolled along with it at its pretty slow pace of 1.5 meters per second—sadly, it couldn’t tell me any jokes to pass the time or even attempt some witty Siri-like repartée. Heck, it couldn’t even tell me where the bathroom was.

As I was part of a gaggle of reporters and curious Lowe’s employees gathered around it, OSHbot sometimes got confused and couldn’t navigate its way forward: "I’m really sorry, I think I’m stuck."

When it finally arrived at the screwdriver section, it proudly proclaimed in its flat, robotic voice: "I think I’m here."

Still, what OSHbot lacks in warmth and wit it makes up in data collection, as Nel also pointed out. "We don’t know what people are asking for when they come into the store, and this is a great way to collect that."

One small step, or scoot, for a robot…

The OSHbot stands about four feet tall, and the main screen interface is topped with a head-like set of cameras (one is a LIDAR, for navigation; the other is a scanning camera). A vertically oriented touchscreen with an on-screen keyboard serves as the OSHbot’s display. When an item comes up, it shows a picture of it, the item’s SKU and price, and its in-store location. Its back is covered in another screen which displays rotating store-related ads.

For now, the OSHbot is one of a kind. Developer Fellow Robots has manufactured two more, which for now are in a back storeroom. Eventually, OSH will release the other two onto the store floor, and perhaps more will show up in other stores nationwide.

In a late October 2014 press release, OSH touted the fact that the robot would "provide an additional layer of support by helping customers with simple questions, enabling more time for them to focus on delivering project expertise."

A company promo video trumpets some pretty neat features, including a Spanish-speaking interface and 3D scanning—but none of those features are available just yet. For now, OSHbot functionality is pretty basic: it can understand simple questions, locate items in-store, and can physically escort customers to product shelves.

The OSHbot seems very similar to other kinds of customer-service robots, like the Botlr at a Starwood Hotel in nearby Palo Alto, which debuted earlier this year. A small handful of interactive robots has been around for some time: a robotic orderly came out first at a Pennsylvania hospital in 1992. More recently, USA Today reported that Amazon uses 15,000 robots to fulfill orders.

The OSHbot is reminiscent of Serge, the robot butler from Battlestar Galactica spinoff, Caprica. In the show, Serge can recognize house guests, fetch drinks, exchange in vocal repartee, retrieve information (think a walking, talking Wikipedia)—but the OSHbot is far more primitive.

"I think it’s iterative," Ryan Calo, a professor of robotics law at the University of Washington, told Ars. "At this point it’s not so different from a check-out kiosk that tells you where things were in the aisle. This is not the same thing as a fully autonomous humanoid robot trying to sell you stuff."

Nel agreed with this sentiment, saying that the Lowe’s Innovation Labs employs "science fiction prototyping."

"We hire professional science fiction writers, give them our market research and trend data, and they write possible futures for how those research and trends would show up in the near future, one, five, and 10 years down the road," he said. "Then we turn those stories into comic books—those are our strategic documents.

"In one of these stories was the future of the store and how it actually would be, and one of the big parts was robots," he said. "The form it took in the story is different than the form it took in the store, and the vision is not fully realized here by any stretch, but it is a first step."

It's still the early days—but people like me will probably be curious as to how the OSHbot can help them or not. (Who among us hasn’t cursed out a self-checkout system?) The day Ars was there, the store had just opened, and there were far more journalists present than actual customers.

It’s clear that the market for robots is exploding: according to the International Federation of Robotics, last year, around 4 million service robots for personal and domestic use were sold, which was 28 percent more than in 2012, reaching $1.7 billion.

Listing image by Cyrus Farivar