Haru’s creation was inspired by characters that appear in animated movies. With its capacity for empathy, our goal is to make Haru a robot companion, living and working alongside humans.

If asked to bring a snack, humans will carry out this task based on knowledge that the snack is on the shelf, etc. How can we develop a spoken dialog system which is equipped with such capacity and is truly able to support humans?

When explaining something to someone, we determine what we are going to say based on their level of understanding. Supposing an intelligent system could estimate a person’s level of understanding in this way, imagine what kinds of processes would make this possible.

HARK is an open-source software that has been developed as a collection of research achievements on robot audition. Microphone array processing based on an array of multiple microphones provides a robot with auditory functions. Specifically, HARK includes functions of estimating the locations of speakers and other sound sources (sound source localization), extracting acoustic signals originating from each sound source (sound source separation) and converting speech into text (automatic speech recognition).

The Honda Communication Assistance (CA) System is one that supports communication between people with hearing difficulties and people with normal hearing. A person with normal hearing speaks into a microphone, and their voice is converted into text and displayed on a screen. A person with hearing difficulties can also write on the screen, enabling two-way communication.