Dinno is a Robot provided by Softbank (Pepper Model) and is programmed in Python. The robots' purpose is to engage, entertain and assist customers in day to day tasks in Cosmote Shops. The robot is used to advertise products, provide instructions on where to find a product and answers questions on prices and special offers. I have developed voice interaction applications for some of the case studies, I have assisted in user testing and behavioural data collection for further research and development in collaboration with research centres. For example, we are collaborating with Athina, a research center specializing in linguistics and informatics in order to improve machine learning algorithms of speech recognition – i.e. cases of children speaking, multilingual applications.
I have mostly focused on the design of dialog flows and front end development in python integrating various APIs . The majority of tasks I have programmed are informative dialogs and text to speech and speech to text conversions. I focused on tasks such as: provide users with data on Cosmote’s products and services, tell jokes based on age and sex (using age and sex recognition services) or provide real time information on weather and other popular subjects using APIs and parse data from websites.
A simple example of an application that I was involved in designing and building is the following:
- The robot says hi to you and asks for your name
- Then it asks you what information you are seeking. It gives you options such as asking about smart phones, tablets etc. If none of the above, it asks you if you want
to be entertained
- Given your answer, it calls the relevant employee to help you, points you to where to go or simply starts telling you jokes or the prediction of the day.
Dinno is also being developed to engage with children, supporting educational events in collaboration with STEM. These actions seek to inspire children and combat gender inequality in STEM professions. In the case of the events for children, I have assisted in developing apps for dancing, telling jokes, and showing games on the tablet to engage children in learning about robotics.