Kismet (robot)

Kismet is a robot head which was made in the 1990s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal as an experiment in affective computing; a machine that can recognize and simulate emotions.

[1] In order for Kismet to properly interact with human beings, it contains input devices that give it auditory, visual, and proprioception abilities.

Low-level features such as pitch mean and energy (volume) variance were extracted from samples of recorded speech.

This architecture significantly improved performance for hard-to-distinguish classes, like approval ("You're a clever robot") versus attention ("Hey Kismet, over here").

The overview sets the human-robot relation within a frame of learning, with Dr. Breazeal providing the scaffolding for Kismet's development.

It offers a demonstration of Kismet's capabilities, narrated as emotive facial expressions that communicate the robot's 'motivational state', Dr. Breazeal: "This one is anger (laugh) extreme anger, disgust, excitement, fear, this is happiness, this one is interest, this one is sadness, surprise, this one is tired, and this one is sleep.