AI for Robotics: Building Jibo, The First Social Robot for the Home
Abstract
Jibo is a robot that understands speech, has a moving body that helps him communicate more effectively and express emotions. Jibo has cameras and microphones to make sense of the world around him, including recognizing and tracking people both from the audio as well as for the visual standpoint. He uses speech recognition, natural language processing, and dialog management to entertain spoken conversations. He can recognize people both from their voice as well as their face. He has a display to show text and images, an animated eye that can morph into shapes, and a touch interface that can be used as a complementary input modality. Jibo talks with his own unique Jibo voice, uses robotic sounds to complement his speech, and his body is animated in sync with his speech, or for the purpose of expressing emotions and performing other activities. By having a complete set of sensorial inputs and outputs, Jibo embodies one the richest human-machine interaction commercial devices with an SDK that can be used by third party developers to build many applications.
In this talk the speaker will take the audience through the journey in which we embarked since we started building such a complex device, and the overt and hidden challenges faced by this endeavor.
About the speaker
Dr. Roberto Pieraccini, a scientist and technologist, has been at the forefront of speech, language, and machine learning innovation for more than 30 years. He is widely known as a pioneer in the fields of statistical natural language understanding and machine learning for automatic dialog systems, and their practical application to industrial solutions. After receiving his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pisa, he worked as a researcher at CSELT (Italy), Bell laboratories, AT&T Labs, and IBM T.J. Watson. He led the dialog technology team at SpeechWorks International, Inc., and was the the CTO of SpeechCycle, and the CEO of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley. The author of “The Voice in the Machine” (MIT Press, 2012), Dr. Pieraccini now leads the Advanced Conversational Technologies team at Jibo.
