Samantha 2 at TED's public demonstration

Samantha 2’s TED demonstration turns Elgin Branch’s canceled household-robot project into a public unveiling of a new assistive technology: instead of making a robot more capable, he proposes removing the robot and connecting a person directly to the devices around them. The presentation moves from popcorn and laughter to a self-operating home environment, then ends with a concrete plan to put Samantha 2 in the hands of paralyzed veterans.

Background: From Samantha to a Different Kind of Interface

At 5 p.m., Branch puts on a headset as his name appears on the large screen. He explains that after an earlier job ended, he eventually found his way to Microsoft and into robotics. His first project, Samantha, was a voice-activated personal robot. Named for the character on Bewitched, it could respond to spoken requests and bring Branch a bag of popcorn. In the demonstration, Samantha glides to a microwave, removes the pre-popped bag, and delivers it to him. Branch calls the system cute and basic; the audience’s applause and laughter make its charm part of the presentation, even as its limitations remain visible.

The popcorn sequence also introduces the social rules built into Samantha. When David Pogue asks for a share, Branch tells him to say please. He explains that his eight-year-old daughter had accused him of being a bully while he worked on the robot, so he programmed politeness into it: please is, in his words, the magic word. The joke briefly makes the machine seem like an extension of family life, shaped by a child’s moral correction as well as by engineering choices. Samantha reaches toward Pogue but drops the bag before he can take it, scattering popcorn across the stage.

Branch later explains why the original project was canceled. Samantha had been taught five hundred commands, and the team could have added five hundred more, but thousands of moving parts made the machine too costly and insufficiently agile for the marketplace. Its failure, as he frames it, did not end the goal of a personal assistant; it exposed the robot itself as the obstacle. He recalls research involving monkeys at Duke and suggests that a personal robot might become possible by losing the robot altogether.

The Demonstration: From Helmet to Bandage

Branch’s account of technological change is presented as a rapid sequence of images. After an opening slide of monkeys with wires coming out of their heads provokes gasps and screams, he apologizes and switches it off. He invokes Moore’s law to describe how, over twenty years, an alarming image of wired brains could give way to a computer chip beneath the skin, and then to a football helmet fitted with electrodes and wires that need not be implanted in the brain.

At 5:27, Branch sets the helmet aside and produces an object that looks like a Band-Aid: Samantha 2. He sticks it on his forehead, just below his hairline, and sits in a La-Z-Boy. He pulls the chair’s lever and reclines, inviting skepticism by promising a real-time demonstration. The shift in scale is striking: the earlier system occupied the stage as a moving robot, while Samantha 2 is small enough to disappear against Branch’s skin. The presentation’s central claim is not merely that the interface has become smaller, but that its relation to the surrounding machines has changed.

A vacuum starts up and moves across the stage, collecting the popcorn Samantha had dropped. Branch lies back with his eyes open and concentrates on the mess; the vacuum then switches off. The television turns on by itself, changes channels, and stops at a Lakers game. These successive actions make the stage look less like a display of one specialized machine than a room in which ordinary appliances have begun to respond without visible commands.

At 5:31, the large screen changes to Outlook. A blank email opens, the cursor enters the recipient field and types Bernadette, then moves to the message field and writes a report on the talk, the malfunctioning clicker, Pogue’s coordination, and the Lakers’ halftime lead. The audience rises and roars. Branch stands, removes the Band-Aid-like device from his forehead, and holds it up, making the small interface itself the final visible object of the demonstration.

Purpose and Reception

Branch announces that Samantha 2 will ship to Walter Reed in March. He directs the audience to a Microsoft video showing paralyzed veterans using the system to cook in a smart kitchen, watch television, work on a computer, and care for a pet. He presents the goal as helping wounded veterans live independent and productive lives, and closes by saying the possibilities are endless. The announcement gives the spectacle a practical destination: the stage performance is meant to introduce a tool for everyday tasks, not only to display a startling technical trick.

The audience’s response and the personal embrace onstage after the talk register the demonstration as a surprise as well as a presentation. The account opens by noting that the talk will not appear on the TED website for a month and that its narrator is working from a phone-video transcription supplied by a blogging friend. That documentary frame—the timed sequence, the improvised jokes, the technical explanation, and the onstage reaction—preserves both the staged nature of a live product demonstration and its uneven, comic particulars. Samantha’s dropped popcorn does not vanish from the story when Samantha 2 appears; it becomes the very mess the new system cleans up, turning the earlier machine’s small failure into the later machine’s proof of concept.