Robot Videos

Better responses with knowledge graph metadata (2022, 3 minutes)

This video shows a Furhat robot giving more intelligent responses by using metadata in a knowledge graph. When asked about restaurants that serve European cuisine, CityTalk uses subclassOf relationships in a taxonomy of cuisines and finds restaurants serving Italian cuisine. When asked about Asian cuisine, CityTalk finds restaurants serving Japanese, Chinese or Thai cuisines. The taxonomy was extracted from WikiData and added to the knowledge graph in a Neo4j database.

Conversational AI and knowledge graphs (2022, 4 minutes)

This video shows the first demo of CityTalk on a Furhat social robot. Using Rasa conversational AI, the Virtual Furhat robot answers queries about restaurants and hotels in Tokyo Waterfront by accessing knowledge graphs in an external Neo4j graph database. The video was shown at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Sapporo, Japan, 2022.

ERICA and WikiTalk (2019, 8 minutes)

This video shows the first demo of ERICA and WikiTalk in the ERATO Ishiguro Symbiotic Human-Robot Interaction program. Researchers at Kyoto University led by Professor Tatsuya Kawahara are developing ERICA's spoken dialogue capabilities. In the video ERICA talks about ancient Greek, robots, artificial intelligence, intelligence in medieval philosophy, and androids. The video was shown at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Macau, 2019.

CityTalk and Tokyo 2020 (2018, 10 minutes)

This video shows a robot giving information about hotels and restaurants in the Tokyo Waterfront area near the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The robot gives information about three hotels in different price ranges. When asked about restaurants, the robot switches domains and gives information about several restaurants in different price ranges and serving different types of food. The video was shown at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Stockholm, 2018.

English and Japanese WikiTalk (2015, 14 minutes)

This video shows WikiTalk's multilingual capabilities. The robot speaks English with an English speaker and Japanese with a Japanese speaker, and talks about Shakespeare and other topics using both English and Japanese Wikipedias. The robot switches to Japanese when the Japanese speaker says "Nihongo" and back to English when the English speaker says "English". The video was shown at the SIGDIAL Conference on Discourse and Dialogue, Prague, 2015.

Finnish WikiTalk (2015, 12 minutes)

This video shows Finnish WikiTalk in a domestic setting. The robot can speak English and Finnish, and talks in Finnish about a wide range of topics using Finnish Wikipedia. As well as making smooth topic shifts to related topics, the robot switches to a completely unrelated topic (a so-called "awkward topic shift") when the user spells the first part of the name of the unrelated topic.

Furhat and WikiTalk first demo (2021, 13 minutes)

This video shows the first demo of WikiTalk with a Furhat robot. A Virtual Furhat talks for more than 10 minutes about social robots, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Manchester United, Old Trafford, and artificial intelligence. The video was made for #FurhatChallenge 2021.

CityTalk Tokyo 2020 first demo (2018, 2 minutes)

This video shows the first demo of CityTalk with new hotel and restaurant databases for Tokyo 2020. The robot tells Dr Kristiina Jokinen of AI Research Center, AIST Tokyo Waterfront, about restaurants in the Tokyo Waterfront area, near the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics.

CityTalk first demo (2018, 4 minutes)

This video shows the first demo of CityTalk. The robot tells about hotels and restaurants in Cambridge. When the person asks about hotels, the robot clarifies which part of town and what price range is suitable, then suggests a hotel using a local hotel database. When the person asks about a restaurant, the robot switches domains and asks which part of town and what kind of food they would like, then suggests two restaurants using a local restaurant database.

SamiTalk first demo (2016, 4 minutes)

The world's first Sami-speaking robot talking about the situation of Sami languages in Finland. SamiTalk is a robot application that tells information from Sami Wikipedia in the North Sami language. This prototype was developed at University of Helsinki for the Academy of Finland DigiSami project. The video was shown at the International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, Saariselkä, Finland, 2016.

MoroTalk first demo (2015, 4 minutes)

MoroTalk is a news-reading robot application that tells local news from online news feeds. The application was developed at University of Helsinki for the future elder-care technology training unit of the SASKY Municipal Education and Training Consortium in Sastamala, Finland. The video shows the first demo of MoroTalk. The robot tells local news in Finnish about Tampere city in Finland using online news feeds of the local Aamulehti newspaper.

WikiTalk first demo (2012, 9 minutes)

This video shows the first ever demo of WikiTalk on a Nao robot at the International Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces in Metz, France in 2012. Although the speech recognition on this older robot was sometimes difficult due to low confidence scores, the demo showed that WikiTalk could support successful information access dialogues with the talking robot. This version of WikiTalk was for English only.