CDM Interact is a Finnish research and development company, working on talking robots and conversational AI systems.
CityTalk is a prototype dialogue system in which users interact with social robots that search knowledge graphs as a primary source of information. The aim is to make the dialogue system more generic by putting metadata about domain ontologies into knowledge graphs instead of into dialogue components. The knowledge graphs are stored in graph databases either locally or in the cloud. The interaction between users, robots, and databases is managed by a conversational AI framework.
WikiTalk enables robots to talk fluently about thousands of topics using information from Wikipedia, and shift smoothly from topic to topic by following the links in Wikipedia. Wikitalk is multimodal and multilingual, integrating face-tracking, nodding and communicative gesturing with speech synthesis and speech recognition in English, Finnish and Japanese.
CityTalk and Tokyo 2020 Olympics (10 minutes)
This video shows a Nao robot giving information about hotels and restaurants near Tokyo 2020 Olympics in the Tokyo Waterfront area. The robot gives information about three hotels in different price ranges. When the user asks about restaurants, the robot switches domains and tells about several restaurants in different price ranges and serving different types of food.
ERICA and WikiTalk (8 minutes)
WikiTalk was used with ERICA android robot in the ERATO Ishiguro Symbiotic Human-Robot Interaction project at Kyoto University, where Graham Wilcock was Visiting Professor in 2018-19. In the video ERICA talks about ancient Greek, robots, artificial intelligence, the concept of intelligence in medieval philosophy, and about male and female android robots.
English and Japanese WikiTalk (14 minutes)
This video shows a Nao robot talking about Shakespeare and other topics in English and Japanese, using English and Japanese Wikipedias. WikiTalk interprets "Julius Caesar" as referring to the Roman emperor or the play by Shakespeare depending on the dialogue context. The robot switches languages when a Japanese speaker says "Nihongo" to switch to Japanese and when an English speaker says "English" to switch to English.
More videos can be seen on the videos page.