A prototype humanoid Store Assistant robot that can work alongside retail workers to welcome and engage customers in a retail setting. The Assistant can greet customers at the door, answer questions about products, direct them to the location of specific products or to other employees, or just chat.
This project incorporates face tracking, speech recognition, a chat engine, text to speech, emotional classification of response text, mapping to a motion library, and synchronizing motion and speech cadence.
The Assistant is more dynamic, more empathic, and more entertaining than previous efforts. Through this we hope to add more value to customer interactions, translating to higher sales, increased loyalty, and repeat visits.
This project was implemented for Hackathon 2016 (opens in new tab).