Who built Kismet the robot?
Dr. Cynthia Breazeal built Kismet at MIT in the 1990s as an experiment in affective computing, a field dedicated to machines that can recognize and simulate emotion.
Questions about Kismet (robot)
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is Kismet the robot designed to do?
Kismet was designed to recognize and simulate human emotion through facial expressions, vocalizations, and movement. It can detect five types of emotional affect in speech and responds with expressive facial cues and proto-language sounds.
How much did Kismet the robot cost to build?
The physical materials for Kismet cost an estimated US$25,000. The robot also runs on hardware that includes four Motorola 68332 processors, nine 400 MHz personal computers, and one additional 500 MHz machine.
What emotions can Kismet the robot express?
Kismet can express anger, extreme anger, disgust, excitement, fear, happiness, interest, sadness, surprise, tiredness, and sleep. At any given moment, it can only occupy one emotional state at a time.
How does Kismet the robot classify human speech?
Kismet's audio system sorts utterances into five categories: approval, prohibition, attention, comfort, and neutral. The classifier uses a gaussian mixture model trained with the expectation-maximization algorithm and runs in two stages to improve accuracy on difficult pairs like approval versus attention.
Is Kismet the robot conscious or does it have real feelings?
No. Dr. Cynthia Breazeal stated directly that Kismet is not conscious and does not have feelings. The robot produces performances of emotional states rather than genuine experiences of them.