Pepper App

After some editing, I've added a video about a project that was short but very interesting: a receptionist app for Pepper, a robot that you've probably seen on TV or in some trade show.

The experience was somewhat surreal - and a little creepy - because the robots belonged to another company and I only could access them on weekends, so apart from security sometimes I was alone in a big building at night talking with robots.

As for the machines themselves, it's impressive the emotional reaction they provoke. We simply are wired in a way that makes us react when something talks and gesticulates in front of us, even when intellectually we know that it's not a person.

Internally, they weren't great, though. They gave me the impression that they consisted of a bunch of systems (movement, speech recognition and synthesis, computer vision...) stick together but not very well coordinated and not very reliable even individually.

So, if you have the idea that these devices have some sort of advanced AI that makes them act organically, forget it. You have to code every action and reaction like a NPC from a video game.