The Furhat Social Companion Talking Head

Abstract

In this demonstrator we present the Furhat robot head. Furhat is a highly human-like robot head in terms of dynamics, thanks to its use of back-projected facial animation. Furhat also takes advantage of a complex and advanced dialogue toolkits designed to facilitate rich and fluent multimodal multiparty human-machine situated and spoken dialogue. The demonstrator will present a social dialogue system with Furhat that allows for several simultaneous interlocutors, and takes advantage of several verbal and nonverbal input signals such as speech input, real-time multi-face tracking, and facial analysis, and communicates with its users in a mixed initiative dialogue, using state of the art speech synthesis, with rich prosody, lip animated facial synthesis, eye and head movements, and gestures.