Voice Activation Control with Digital Assistant for Humanoid Robot Torso

Digital Voice Assistants are an emerging technology due to improvements on mobile communication and computing technologies and are becoming more popular in recent years due to growing marketing strategies on new smart home devices by cloud service providers. Most of the applications on smart environments and assistive robotics are relying on these digital assistants, or Internet of Things (IoT) devices, based on the nature of the system, namely voice activation and control. Smart home assistants, such as Amazon Echo with Alexa and Google Home are the most well-known examples on this manner, relying on the base of processing verbal requests by looking for key words in the conversation as well as the structure of a natural language source of communication. Later, these key words are used to trigger the predefined skills for fulfilling the users’ request. A simple structure of the process works both ways between the user and the device by providing a verbal request/order and verbal feedback. In this project, we have built a system, a humanoid robot torso and an IoT device, to control and simulate the process of an interactive functioning assistive robot and tried to improve the effects of Human Robot Interactions.