Kate Hawkesby: Rise of the robots and new technology to make our lives easier

COMMENT: As teachers prepare to possibly strike again over pay and conditions, I see technology could now be helping assist them in their jobs.

The mundane parts anyway, like taking the roll. Let's face it, the sooner technology helps us in all our jobs the better.

According to a new trial computer vision software, which performs facial recognition, can track the arrival and departure of students from school grounds. Not only that, it can do it in real time, and send the data to all concerned: teachers, parents, truancy monitors. Without a single teacher lifting a single pen.

So is AI here to rescue us from all the tedious parts of our jobs? Hopefully yes.

Anything that's time consuming or administrative (ie not involving too much thinking and brain power) could be farmed out to the robots surely?

And it wouldn't just be overworked teachers it would be helping - technology like this face recognition roll call for example could save taxpayers and the government millions of dollars.

The brains behind this particular software is an outfit called Aware Group. And according to one report, it says AI like this "could eliminate one of the most time-consuming administrative tasks for any education institution, and do it with high levels of privacy".

They've crunched the numbers, and for the average 3 minutes per class a student waits to have the roll taken, if you look at it "across 13 years in education", they say, "this can amount to over 122 days lost per student". That's a lot of lost time.

So where else could AI be applied to save us time and money?

Well in most administrative heavy tasks I imagine, but can someone please tell me when the robots will be able to take over basic printing for us?

Is it just our workplace or are printers everywhere notoriously on the blink? Could a robot do a better job?

I can't begin to tell you how much time I lose every morning trying to get the printers working, undo paper jams, re-stock paper, replace toner, hit buttons, wait for it to recalibrate - it's a seemingly neverending waste of time.

No it won't help improve truancy rates or security, but if someone can just present me with some AI which makes a printer work, and just print stuff like they're supposed to, I'd be eternally grateful.