Transforming IbnSina into an advanced multilingual interactive android robot

Abstract

IbnSina is the world's first Arabic-language conversational android robot, and is also part of an interactive theatre with multiple possibilities for human teleparticipation. In this paper, we describe extensions carried out to IbnSina's software architecture in order to enrich its capabilities in multiple ways, so that it can become an exciting educational / persuasive robot in the future. The main axis for extension were: access to online (Wikipedia) and stored (Koran database) content for dialogue generation, basic multilingual capability exploration (English and Arabic, also utilizing Google Translate), basic read-aloud-text capability (through OCR), and systematization of motor control (with higher-level API for real-time lip syncing, eye blinking, natural looking random face movements, and interpolation between facial expressions including an affective state subsystem). With such capabilities, IbnSina becomes closer to an attractive robot that can find real-world application in malls, schools, as a receptionist etc.