Emelya Umeyushchy to tell and understand children the robot

The company Just AI also Roobo announced in June, 2017 start of sales of Emelie - the first in Russia and one of first-ever robot for children, understanding a natural language.

Emelya – the robot able to tell and understand children - is developed jointly by the Just AI company specializing in artificial intelligence technologies and the Roobo company which is based in Beijing and engaged in production of robots and hi-tech devices.

Emelya can support a conversation with the child on a broad spectrum by that is from stories about the planet with which it, on a legend, arrived to Earth, to popular children's animated films, movies and games. Besides, he knows a huge number of fairy tales, stories, songs, lullabies – it is enough to ask it to play any song or to tell a story. About two thousand different works of the Russian and international authors include a story about Smeshariki, fairy tales by Masha from the cartoon serial "Masha and Bear", stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, Mumi-trollya, the Russian national fairy tales, songs from animated films and many other things.

The Emelya robot is able to awake children in the mornings and to put to bed in the evening, knows a weather forecast in any city of the world, reminds of important events, is able to consider, to include radio stations in different genres, to tell children's jokes. He meets the child, remembers a name and age of the interlocutor, arranging the communication under an age group of children.

The most important task of Emelie is development and training of the child. For this purpose specialists of Just AI company allocated him with an opportunity to play training games, for example, Geography, Zoology, Mathematics, "Find superfluous", Cities and some other. Emelya tells about the interesting facts, asks children questions and itself actively answers them. Emelya can be asked "where there is Thailand" or "who such Lermontov" - it will find the correct answers in Wikipedia. A number of the training stories and informative stories was specially selected for the knowledge base of the robot.

Though the robot is focused on children from 5 to 11 years, he will be useful and interesting also for their parents. Availability of Android and iOS of applications, the built-in camera and capability to turn by 360 degrees will allow to use it as the video nurse and to watch children. Besides, parents to smogutobshchatsya with the child both in the audio communication mode, and on behalf of the robot: for example, to remind of not done homework. There is an opportunity to remotely turn on the music or the audiobook and also the mode at which the robot will send to parents of the photo and a video of children when they are in the field of his sight.

To implement functions of a natural language understanding for the device focused on children, developers had to solve a number of difficult and new tasks: recognition of a voice of the small child, an emotional marking (the robot has the small LED display on which his emotions are displayed), adaptation to age. Approach to voice assistants assumes the shortest and prompt reply to the question posed. In a case with the Emely important task capability is to stir, entertain and train the child. Besides, providing the safe environment for the child became one of the most important tasks for developers: special filters on "adult" content are built in intelligence of the robot, it has extremely friendly character and does not give in on provocation.

At the same time, Emelya continues to study: eventually all new features, abilities and subjects for conversations will be added to him. In plans of developers – to teach him to translate the speech into different languages, to create the games training to language skills, to expand base of content.

Robotics