Furhat Interface

Furhat is a social robot developed by Furhat Robotics. It is a robot head with a projected face, which can be customised with different faces and voices. It has an array of microphones and speakers which allow it to record and play audio. Although it features a camera, this is not used in this component, which focuses on the audio capabilities of the robot. Other capabilities of the robot, such as face recognition, facial expressions, and head movements, are not used either. With this component it is possible to input dialogue in the VALAWAI system, and receive the corresponding responses. The component can be customised with the identifier for the participant in the dialogue. The input is performed with voice thanks to the embedded speech-to-text functionalities of the robot, and the output dialogue is reproduced using the text-to-speech module, with the default voice model configured in the robot.