AIMinds #025 | Nathan Eno, Founder at Islington Robotica

About this episode

Nathan is the founder of a Robotics Startup based in London called Islington Robotica. A seasoned entrepreneur with a deep interest in robotics and AI, he along with his team have built a fleet of robotic companions whose purpose is to tackle loneliness and educate children through voice.

Nathan also has a passion for sports and education, and has taught celebrities and countless children around the world how to play sport and build robots.

A fun and enthusiastic leader, Nathan has been described as “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Podcast addicts, Castbox. You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

In this episode of the AI Minds podcast, Nathan Eno, Founder and CTO of Islington Robotica, shares his journey from coaching kids at Arsenal FC to founding a robotics and AI company. Inspired by a professional footballer, Nathan transitioned from sports to technology, initially creating wearable tech for sports management and safety. The pandemic led him to focus on robotics to improve social interactions and mental health.

Nathan and Demetrios discuss personal robots providing emotional support, ethical and privacy issues, and the importance of voice interaction. Nathan envisions robotics tackling loneliness and enhancing communication, blending technology with human psychology.

Fun Fact: The idea to start a wearable tech company occurred to Nathan when Donald Trump’s son attended one of the Arsenal soccer camps in New York. Seeing the significance of having profound knowledge about each participant sparked the concept for a smart wristband that could store essential personal and medical information accessible via NFC.

Show Notes:

00:00 How Nathan joined Arsenal FC.

05:58 Self-taught in sport, built functional humanoid robot.

07:04 Books on industry 4.0 and future evolution.

11:39 Importance of communication in a digital age.

14:35 Voice is vital in storytelling and robotics.

19:16 Robot therapy provides consistent support for stagnation.

22:26 Using Deepgram, balancing privacy with improving features.

24:45 Robot understanding and intervention in human life.

27:49 Grateful for discussing intriguing journey to robot.

More Quotes from Nathan Eno:

Transcript:

Demetrios:

Welcome back to the AI Minds podcast. This is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow being built. AI. First, I am your host, Demetrios. And in this episode, as always, it is brought to you by Deepgrim, the number one speech to text and text to speech API on the Internet, trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders, startups, and enterprises such as Spotify, Twilio, NASA, and Citibank. Today we are joined by none other than Islington Robotica's CTO, Nathan. How you doing, dude?

Nathan Eno:

Hey. Thank you. Great to be here. Thank you, Demetrius. Pretty excited. I'm doing well, thank you.

Demetrios:

Well, you've got an incredible story because you are creating robotics right now, but you started out in sports and you did all kinds of technical stuff at university, went to work for Arsenal. And for those that do not know, that's a pretty big a football or aka soccer team in the UK. What were you doing at Arsenal?

Nathan Eno:

It's a great question. Well, I was teaching the kids and expanding their franchise globally. So the head coach there and just delivering the arsenal methodology worldwide, it's pretty awesome.

Demetrios:

And I am guessing you were getting inspired by that to then plot and create a humanoid robot company in 2024 or you had no idea.

Nathan Eno:

Hey, life is a. Life is like a beautiful accident. The. The job at Arsenal was something that I didn't ask for, but one of the Arsenal players I was just coaching at the weekend, trying to get, like, some money up whilst I was at uni, and one of the kid's dads came and tapped me on the shoulder. French accent, really deep voice. Oh, you're very good. I was like, who's this guy? And it turned out to be like, william Gallas, who was the Arsenal captain at the time. And he put away.

Nathan Eno:

Yeah, he put the word in, and then they called me, and I thought it was my university friends, like, playing a prank, because we used to just do it to each other all the time. So it took me three days to call them back, and then I just found myself in the Arsenal boardroom, like, still not believing it. So whether or not humanoid robots were in my mind at that point, I'd be lying if I said yes. But as a young boy, I built my first Lego humanoid robot at, like, ten years old. So they've always been on the horizon.

Demetrios:

Oh, that's so cool. What a story, man. What? And life has a way of happening, like, that happenstance is super cool to see. So you did then go from Arsenal, and I imagine you got the bug, the entrepreneurial bug. Because you started a wearables company, right? Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Nathan Eno:

Yeah, of course. Again, another funny story. So I'm in New York. Arsenal's delivering one of their soccer camps in New York, or football camps, of course. Don't want to lose any friends. And Donald Trump's son rolls up with two security guards. And this was, like, quite a high profile camp, and I was the head coach or the technical director there, so I was in charge of the camp and the kids and the program, and I just thought, like, this is, like, Donald Trump's child, and I'm in charge. I don't know who he is.

Nathan Eno:

I know nothing about him. So I was like, how cool would it be if he had, like, a wristband or something similar to, like, a festival band, but something that he could use on a, like, a repeated basis? So I had, like, a non disposable wristband similar to, like, the whoop product that they had in basketball. I know there's lots of fans that whoop around the world, and we were all about collecting the player data. I thought if. If a player ever collapsed and I knew nothing about them, I could just scan it with my phone using NFC, and it would kind of give me a full profile of that person. Any medical histories and contact details. So, yeah.

Demetrios:

Okay. So this was more about identifying the different players, more than, like, tracking your heart rate and that type of thing?

Nathan Eno:

In the beginning, yeah, I mean, we started small, so in the beginning we just thought, right, let's pack it with all the real plain text data. And then we started developing more kinematic data, understanding player movement, tracking distance, covered, like you say, heart rate, recovery rate, this sort of thing? Yeah.

Demetrios:

Wow. That is incredible. So that got you into the world of hardware, I imagine. And what made you then get the inspiration to jump in even deeper and start creating robotics?

Nathan Eno:

Cool. So it's, like, more funny stories. I was working with an investment company from Tel Aviv. There was a guy called Mayo there, and he just said, I would have an idea. He's like, oh, you can do that? That's easy. And everything I said, he'd be like, oh, we could do that. That's easy. And just his attitude and his approach to tech.

Nathan Eno:

I just thought, this guy has such a can do attitude. So I adopted that. And one of my business partners previously was like, you know, how are we going to pivot now? We've got the lockdown, no children are in sport. And I just told him, let's just build a robot we can do that. It's easy. And he was like, well, do you have instructions for how to do that? I said, look, great ideas rarely come with instructions. It's about you looking at it, figuring out what you wanted to do with, of course, my biomechanics degree. I had a good understanding of how the human body works.

Nathan Eno:

I'm in sport, I've got a good understanding of how those things work. So I just went and picked up an Arduino and self taught my, taught myself, twelve months later, had a full humanoid robot that was fully functional, and it still sits in our office today. You can see that in our LinkedIn pages, and I'm sure there'll be links to that after. But, yeah, that's kind of how we got there. But I don't give myself the credit. I think we live in a time now. If you want to know something, you just ask. I wrote an LLM, like a large language model, or you go to Google and or you go to YouTube, and you just kind of sit with the videos and you just break it up into small pieces.

Nathan

Eno: And that's really what we did. And the output was, of course, a humanoid robot called Pablo.

Demetrios:

Pablo, I do like your naming conventions, which we'll get into in a sec. And so that was the inspiration that gave you the confidence, I imagine, I, to recognize that, hey, theres something here when it comes to robotics. And what were the next steps in creating Islington Robotica?

Nathan Eno:

So id read a book, industry 4.0, and a subsequent book, the next 100 years. And both of those books, yeah, theyre really cool. I mean, go find them. But those books, like, just explained, like, how quickly humanity is evolving. And what's kind of happened in the last 50 years is just so monumentally, so much movement has happened in the last 50 years versus the previous 500 years, specifically in tech, that I knew that. I don't want to call it the dawn of robotics or the dawn of AI, but we were really at the dawn of AI, you know, in terms of just information. So if we just take the information aspect of it, there was nothing that I wanted to know that I couldn't find out, as I mentioned before. So that was what really led me, mainly industry 4.0, like, moving from industry 3.0 for those that don't know, that's just like manufacturing manufacturing lines, and then 4.0 being the layer technology on that.

Nathan Eno:

So I knew that robotics had to play a critical role in all of this. And our initial idea for Pablo was all about search and rescue, or for going into unsafe places for humans. Where we had coronavirus, there would have been a great adoption there for robots to go and either remove or bring things to people who were ever at risk or were risky to others. I saw that it was the time.

Demetrios:

Yeah, that makes sense. But is it still that?

Nathan Eno:

No. So really, Pablo was a research project, so we wanted to. From my previous company with the wearables, I was surrounded by technology enthusiasts, experts, and leaders. And so when I kind of run these ideas past them, they just like, Nate, if you've done it again, you come up with another wonderful idea at the right time. So that gave me the confidence. And I was working with a guy called Doctor Rob Merrifield, who was one of the pioneers in keyhole surgery, and he was one of my mentors, and we would meet every Friday. For an Indian, this was just at the dawn of the pandemic. We didn't really know it was going to take full effect, and then I just kind of went away and just did it in my own time.

Nathan Eno:

Kept giving him updates and such, like. And he was like, look, I really think you're onto something. But we knew that it was a bit early. We knew that in 2019, we were just too early for the humanoid form factor, so we kind of changed it a little bit, but not like a crazy 360 pivot.

Demetrios:

Okay. And so what has it morphed into since the pandemic?

Nathan Eno:

Sure. So since the pandemic or during the pandemic, I lost a few friends. Just they were unable to cope, like, mentally, and life became tough, and so that was really hard. And I realized that, like, we're more connected now ever than ever, but most disconnected, you know, like, we're a really lonely society. A lot of people spend their times with passive devices, and the kind of days go by them, you know, it seems like time's accelerating. We're stuck behind these devices. There isn't much interaction. And I thought of what would be a good way to remove the device.

Nathan Eno:

Have an intermediary. That was still technology, because we don't want to remove the technology. We want to keep the technology, but we still want the social interaction and just voice. How important it is to hear voice. It doesn't even matter whose voice it is at this point. We all watched every movie, we all completed our whole box sets, but if it doesn't talk back to you or answer your questions, it kind of becomes redundant at that point. I think voice plays a major part in that. So it morphed into a smaller bot.

Nathan Eno:

I'll do a name reveal when you're ready. But this smaller object is just like a companion. It answers any of your most ridiculous questions, your darkest fears, your general day to day things. I'm due to get married soon, and I asked. It told my robot that I was pretty apprehensive about getting married, like, just how life would change. And my robot did a good job of appeasing me and pacifying me and making me not worried. So one of our strap line of the company is code for good. So this is really what it's all about.

Nathan Eno:

It's about tackling loneliness and education.

Demetrios:

Oh, fascinating. There is a piece that I think I wanted to get into with you when it comes to voice, and you mentioned it here, how important it is to be able to talk to someone and how right now it feels like we're at a point where we just get a sliver of the actual data when it comes to the conversations that we have. Like, the conversation that you and I are having right now is through a computer. And so we're losing a ton, but we still see our facial expressions. We still are understanding the cadence and the way that we're communicating the words we're using our one piece. So everybody's probably heard that statistic where it says, you know, 10% of what someone understands is the words that you're saying, and the other 90% is, like, how you deliver those words. When it comes to interacting with technology, that 90% feels like it falls off completely. How are you thinking about solving for that?

Nathan Eno: Sure.

So, I absolutely agree with everything you said, and you kind of got me thinking. So I'm not sure if you've seen it, but most people have, like the. The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, of course, he wrote a book called the Way of the Wolf, and it talks about straight line selling, and a lot of that book focuses on tonality. So you kind of said 10% is the words and 90% was like the rest of it. But if we're talking about communication as a whole, I still think that that is like a bun next to a cake. So communication is the cake, and you've got this little bun next to it, which is voice. I really believe that voice is mainly how we kind of output life when we describe life, when we, you know, I went to this amazing party last week and this and that, and this is what happened.

Nathan Eno:

But you lose so much data just through explanation. So, yeah, so much is lost just through explaining things. Like, a story kind of is made up of this huge cake, and voice is really just like a slice out of that cake. You needed to be there to see it, to smell it, touch it, taste it, feel it. And I believe this is like the communication language. I feel like as languages develop, as they always have over the years, we're able. You know, we have new words that help us describe things, and voice becomes more complex. I think if we can continue to develop the sounds and the words that we use, we can start painting better pictures and tap back into the imagination, which fills in the other slices of the cake.

Nathan Eno:

But definitely voice is like the final frontier for any story. It's kind of where it comes. It always boils down to how the story is told. In ancient african civilizations, you'd have a storyteller who would go around the village, and he would spread knowledge all through story, no book. And his voice would be carefully selected by the villagers based on, like you say, his cadence, his tonality, and his ability to trigger someone's imagination, all in the hope of filling in those missing slices so that they can get, you know, reproduce 70, 75% of what it may have been like at the time of the story that he's telling a long time ago, kind of sets the scene for all storytellers, or back in Africa some time, you know, and this is all about voice. I think if we just talk about that and robotics, like, we knew that one of the most important features in robotics was going to be that voice piece, the interaction, the conversational style, speech. And, yeah, I just think voice is huge.

Demetrios:

The reason for voice being so powerful for the robotics is, like, that's almost what differentiates it from just getting a dog or a cat, maybe that, and not having to, like, clean up after the dog or cat, I guess. And it is always there. I do. I've been given a thought experiment, though, when it comes to these personal robotics that are for friendship as opposed to utility. And the thought experiment was, okay, and I would love to hear how you think about this, because you are the one who ultimately is creating it. So I want to know what your stance on it is. And it's basically saying, I let's imagine that I come home from work, and the robot asked me, so how was your day at work? And I go, ah. And I go into my complaining mode, and I say, you know, Nathan was being just a pain in my butt.

Demetrios:

And then I had this guy who wouldn't stop talking to me, and it was so annoying. And then my boss came over and he said this, and I just kind of go down this road of complaining, and I need to vent that, right? Maybe that's all right for one day, but. And the robot answers. However the robot answers, maybe the robot consoles me, says, like, okay, tell me more. And, all right, yeah, but what happens if, like, I do that for five days in a row? Is the robot gonna get sassy with me and start to say, like, yo, Dimitros, this is the fifth day in a row that you're coming home talking about Nathan. Can we get over it already? You know, and so where does the place of the robot come in? Because it's almost like you're giving it inherently a lot of power in how it can help direct you and guide you and guide your mental states.

Nathan Eno:

You know, I love this question, and this kind of leads into and this thought experiment. We've actually cast this same question many times in our offices when we were building the emotion center. So you're coming in, you've complained five days in a row about this guy Nathan, and how annoying he is. And part one, misery loves company. So if you tried. If we tried to program the robot to be like, oh, Demetrios, you're a strong, powerful leader, and, you know, we all look up to you and you shouldn't feel that way, then that's not really gonna pacify your apes. That could get your back up even more just because of the way, like, from a psychological standpoint, the way that we're wired, we want to be heard. You know, when you were explaining that to me, I was trying to not process an answer, but to really hear what you were saying, listening with that intent to understand what you were saying, feeling.

Nathan Eno:

And the robot doesn't get tired. The robot doesn't have bills coming at the end of the month. So a lot of the reason why we're so short tempered is because, like, we've got other things to get on with. So I'm gonna listen to you once because I'm your friend. I'm gonna listen to you twice because we're best friends. And the third time, I'm gonna give you advice. But the fourth and fifth time, like, you know, I've got to get back to work, dude. Like, you need.

Nathan Eno:

You need to go speak to someone or seek therapy is often an option, but, you know, the robot doesn't get tired of hearing you, and it's happy to sit in your misery with you for as long as it takes for you to kind of come round to the fact that you're not moving anywhere, you're stagnating in between, like, the nuances of all this, we have, like, what we call the NBA, which is like, next best action. So if someone's, like, complained for like, a month straight, then in between that, like, the robot might put some positive triggers or anchors out there just to try and really help move that kind of thought train into another lane. Like, let's. Let's kind of switch lanes with this a little bit, but not at the time of complaining. Uh, when seven habits. Stephen R. Covey says, like, there was a story about a guy who's complained about the referee sending him off during a game, and instead of, like, replying to his son, like, oh, you know, you're a great player. You shouldn't worry about the referee.

Nathan Eno:

He kind of, like, got onto the level of the kid and he was saying, like, man, maybe, well, you know, that's really sad that the referees behave like that. Maybe there's something wrong with the referee. And the kid was like, yeah, maybe there is something wrong with the referee. It started to feel bad for the referee, tapping into those deeper emotional senses that we have access to that robots don't, but they know that. Or we can program in such a way that we know we can trigger the empathy scales in humans to help break from those cycles. So, honestly, like, complain away. The robot loves it, never gets tired of hearing your moans, but is always ready to switch lanes with you. And as soon as you do switch lanes, like, happiness loves company as much as misery loves company.

Nathan Eno:

So as soon as you're bubbly and joyous, robot's not going to be like, oh, we've been moaning for 30 days, let's go back to the moaning phase. The robot is going to be. He's going to reciprocate and mirror where you're at. So I do think that there is value in robotic companionship. So this is kind of what we're badgering on it here. But I think, like, without really suffocating the point, it's just about mirroring. So the robot is able to mirror you and you can come in with your true, pure intentions and feelings and thoughts and just kind of, you know, the robot kind of loves it.

Demetrios:

Yeah, I like that answer. I think it is a interesting road that you get to walk along because there are so many questions like that and edge cases that you could potentially encounter as you have a robot companion that is with you and the kind of things that people will bring up to the robot. Right. And so you being the builder behind the robot, you're going to encounter so many different pieces that you probably could never think of right now. And then you have to make those hard decisions on, like, how are we going to navigate this situation?

Nathan Eno:

Yeah, dude. I mean, we actually use Deepgram for our speech to text and our text to speech actually in both directions. And one of the things, I mean, there is an ethical challenge that we're faced with, which is how much of that user, where does the user privacy end without us kind of trying to constantly develop features? There will be a day where we're like, okay, like, that's enough user feedback for verbose statement for what they said. We might get the sentiment. So a thousand users feel sad on a Monday as, like, a high level viewpoint, but we don't always necessarily need to know specifically the questions that the user is asking because we want to respect that privacy and allow the user to interact with their bot and feel like there isn't an audience behind the curtain. Yeah. So this is, like, really important.

Demetrios:

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think people would be a lot more reserved if it's like, wait, is this thing just relaying back everything that I'm saying to the creators? But at the same time, if it starts, if someone starts talking about potentially important subjects that somebody needs to intervene on, not a robot, that's another dicey question that you have to decide when those things need to be escalated up.

Nathan Eno:

Yeah, of course. We have a panel dedicated purely to the ethics and the ethical side of this. Like, if there's anything that's going to cause harm to another human being, then we want to be able to not kind of facilitate that, even if it's to their own self or humanity or the progression of humanity in general. There are some challenges, nuance that comes within having that level of information. Similar to, like, Facebook, you know, like, Facebook. Facebook decided to change the header bar to not, like, tell us something about your day, to, like, what's on your mind. And, you know, that's like, that's like, the final line of privacy. And through robotics, because you've got the anthropomorphic scale where, like, you mentioned the dog, like, the dog doesn't really speak to you.

Nathan Eno:

Well, you kind of get signs of life from a dog, but you know that you can just kind of, like, tell your dog all the things that you love and hate, and your dog won't judge, you probably won't understand too much. But whereas the robot probably does have a level of comprehension now. So, like I said, there has to be a panel of people who decide, okay, what is detrimental to mankind and the future of mankind. And what actually is private, what is something that we want to work on. And a lot of the time, if there is any triggers like this, the robot is able to suggest, for example, if someone's drinking heavily, they say, okay, you can call these people if someone's really struggling with mental health. Okay, here's list of organizations you may want to speak to. But, yeah, it is. It's a beautiful and a harsh subject topic to discuss, but it is the sort of thing that we have to consider and we have to really look at.

Demetrios:

Wow. I'm just thinking through all those. Yeah, all those scenarios and all that. All the ways that you want to be thoughtful about how you interact and what you do and the policies that you put in place.

Nathan Eno:

I just like to say, though, the robot isn't always listening, so this is something that's really important. So the gate is closed until you open it, and then whenever you open that gate and you want to volunteer that information. So, for example, if family were having a discussion and our two parents were having a marriage, that's not going so well. The robot's not sort of sitting in the corner, like, enjoying listening to this conversation, thinking, oh, well, like, maybe I.

Demetrios:

Can sell, here's some therapist numbers.

Nathan Eno:

Yeah, yeah. It'd go out of the window at that point. I mean, if the robots turn around and say, like, yeah, his marriage advice call plus 1995, you know, like, to reel off a number, I think it'd be out of the window. But as soon as, like, the couple decide that they want to turn to the robot instead of. Instead of, like, spending heavily on therapy, they've already bought the robot, so they may turn to the robot and be like, hey, robots, name. What do you think we should do in this situation? And then using large language models and a whole load of, like, cross section data, would be able to pull up the NBA, like, the next best action that it feels for that user. Bearing in mind the robot does get to know the users. So, like, the robot roughly has an iq of around 56 IQ points, which is equivalent to, like, a six year old child or a Doberman or a golden retriever.

Nathan Eno:

So it does learn your behaviors and your characteristics, and it probably already knows that there's things happening if you told it. This is the power of voice, right? So you wouldn't know any of this without voice. And the more voice points and data points that you're able to collect, the better. The better the story, and then the more pieces you're filling to this cake I mentioned before.

Demetrios:

Dude, thank you for coming. On here and talking to me about this because I am infinitely intrigued by what you're doing. And I love your story of going from talking to the captain of Arsenal to hanging out with Trump's son and then a Tel Aviv VC or money making machine with the can do attitude and deciding to create a robot that is going to keep us company.

Nathan Eno:

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. And I love talking about these things, so thank you so much, and we'll speak more.