ATOM Robot SDK: Technical FAQ

Below are the most frequently asked questions regarding the ATOM Robot SDK.

General

• What are the contents of the ATOM Robot SDK?

  The ATOM Robot SDK contains the complete ATOM Spoken Dialogue SDK. In addition, it contains a robot framework (as C++ soure code) facilitating the integration of different robots. Finally, the SDK contains all required grammars, dialogue scripts, databases and applications to build a complete robot reference application. All grammars, databases and dialogue scripts as well as the multimodal framework are included as source code.

• What is the advantage of the ATOM Robot SDK compared to the ATOM Spoken Dialogue SDK?

  Because the ATOM Robot SDK contains a complete reference application as source code, it reduces the learning curve to build a spoken language interface to a robot.

• What kind of dialogue capabilities are supported?

  For the most part, the interactions are only limited by the creativity of the dialogue designer. However, the larger the vocabulary grows, the more difficult it becomes to program appropriate dialogues.

• What is required to equip my robot with natural spoken dialogue capabilities?

  There are two ways to add natural spoken dialogue capabilities to your robot. One option is to add the speech and language processing software on-board. The second option is to have the speech and language processing software run on a PC that communicates with your robot wirelessly.

  For the first option, you need a microphone and loudspeakers on board your robot. Also, computing power should be equivalent to that of a 400MHz ARM processor, with about 20 MB of RAM available. These numbers are only guidelines and may vary on your specific robot configuration and the speech recognizer and text-to-speech engine you are using. You will also need third-party speech recognizer and text-to-speech engine.

  For the second option, you need a robot that can be remote controlled from your PC (for example, through IR or Bluetooth). Furthermore, the remote control needs to be programmable, in other words, needs to have an API. Finally, you need a microphone and loudspeakers as well as the standard Microsoft speech recognizer and text-to-speech engine.

• Can I program the robot so that it expresses a certain character, for example, being girly or friendly?

  Yes, using our patent-pending template technology, it is easy to program the robot such that certain characteristics can be expressed. It is also possible to change characteristics on the fly, for example, the robot gets angry if it is ignored for a certain amount of time, but becomes friendly again as soon as somebody talks to it.

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