Sweet vibes arose at first sight when SpareBank 1 SMN's Knut Eilif Halgunset speeddated NorwAI's "social" robot Kaia at NorwAI Innovate – the innovation conference in Trondheim recently.

The bank's Head of Transformation and Strategic partners immediately saw opportunities when he was introduced to Kaias' advanced skills.

The robot is not a regular chatbot. Kaia is an AI controlled artificial head, and can with advanced computer programs, be trained to have a spoken dialogue with people, memorize what is said there and then, in addition, also remember from previous dialogues.

Kaia can also add facial expressions and head movements that give a vivid impression of what is being said.

The robot is not a regular chatbot. Kaia is an AI controlled artificial head, and can with advanced computer programs, be trained to have a spoken dialogue with people, memorize what is said there and then, in addition, also remember from previous dialogues. Kaia can also add facial expressions and head movements that give a vivid impression of what is being said.

Combined with the development of the new, colossal Norwegian language model that NorwAI is developing with the University of Oslo, Kaia will have a completely different vocabulary for a lively dialogue with speech.

- Even though most people get better advice by talking to people, the threshold is too high for some. We have customer experiences and surveys telling us that some customers prefer digital consulting. They may be reluctant to talk to others. They may feel more comfortable, ask more, and feel more convenient having a digital dialogue at a time and circumstance of their own choice, says Knut Eilif Halgunset.

Kaia is mobile. It is easy to imagine that Kaia can meet customers physically in several contexts where people meet.

Knut Eilif Halgunset says that social robots like Kaia is a possible gateway in relation to young and future bank customers:

- The young people today are digital from childhood. They are easy to adopt to new forms of communication. This is not distant future. I believe is something that will appear not far ahead, says Knut Eilif Halgunset.

SpareBank 1 SMN has for some time worked on new, digital solutions. The collaboration with NTNU and the partnership with NorwAI opens up new opportunities. United and increased resources, the university's expertise and research fellows' innovation ideas can contribute not only to improving existing business models. It can also build new platforms and explore opportunities that are not known today.

- These are exciting times. We are lucky to live them, says Knut Eilif Halgunset.

A leap into future for robots

By postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Kille, NorwAI

Modern Chatbots employ a variety of resources to engage with users. Recently, language models have started to complement knowledge bases, templates, rules, and the use of APIs. Thereby, social robots have access to a plethora of information and functions.

In the Summer of 2021, NorwAI purchased a Furhat robot to further explore the use of a social robot. Such a robot supports the fundamental work on human-computer interactions focusing on language and gestures. A group of students had the opportunity to develop the underlying framework for future research.

The Furhat comes equipped with the ability to recognize spoken text. The system takes such a query as input and traverses the depicted flow chart to come up with the best possible response. The server includes access to indexed web pages as well as an interface to Wolfram Alpha’s API. Subsequently, a Cross-Encoder, a neural architecture, combines the different channels and scores each candidate document. Based on the scores, the system decides either to return the facts from Wolfam Alpha, a snippet of text from the index, or create an answer based on the previous dialogue. A demonstration of the system is available at:

https://ntnu.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=2f5f1ae2-b59c-4369-b358-addd00d5c62a

In the next years, NorwAI will address a set of crucial research questions related to human-computer interaction and social robots, for instance:

• How to use language models to improve the dialogues?
• How to deal with multi-lingual scenarios?
• How to recognize and deal with situations in which the robot lacks the desired information?
• How to handle content that is hard to speak such as tables or images?
• How to integrate social robots with IoT devices to provide more utility?

The Kaia social robotics project is funded by partners of NorwAI, the department of Computer Science and the faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at NTNU.  Post doc Benjamin Kille is the project leader, though a number of Master students have been involved in the implementational work.  If you have any questions about Kaia or social robots in general, feel free to contact Benjamin.

mailto:benjamin.u.kille@ntnu.no