Teaching a Robot New Languages - How to Do It?

We thrive on collaborating with cutting-edge technologies, and the robotics department at Snowdog is no exception. Our exciting venture with Pepper has led us to numerous events, driven by the remarkable collaborations and the growing interest in leveraging robotics as a valuable resource in commercial and organizational settings.

During our most recent event, from June 12th to 17th, we embarked on a journey with Pepper to Hessentag (opens in a new tab), the largest state festival in Germany held in Bad Hersfeld. This vibrant cultural fair and festival serves as a platform for people from all corners of Germany to immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of Hessian culture, traditions, contemporary lifestyle, and pertinent issues. Representing the region of Wielkopolska, a partner of Hesse, we had the privilege to attend this event alongside Pepper.

For Pepper, this marked a significant milestone as it ventured abroad, embraced a new language, and eagerly shared captivating tales about its hometown. The experience was truly remarkable, granting us invaluable insights and learnings that will shape our future endeavors.

Pepper speaks German

Pepper has had some experience working in the tourism industry, as he had already represented Wielkopolska at Tour Salon in Poznań. However, until now Pepper has worked primarily in Polish. For Hessentag he needed to learn a bit of German. We initially thought this sounded simple - just change Pepper’s language, and translate all the dialogue, and have some fun. Of course, it didn’t end up working this way.

Interactions with Pepper are a bit more complex, and to reach a natural conversation, the language he uses should sound human. It was important that Pepper could communicate well with native German speakers. We concluded that a simple one-to-one translation is not enough and it is necessary to add some human touch. Some phrases we are familiar with in Polish or English will sound odd or are just not used in German. There are also phrases that may be more exclusive to the audience’s language that we need to discover. It is important to consult a native speaker and conduct tests in order to check whether questions are recognized well and responses are adequate. That last reality-check was like a net which allowed us to catch the potential language issues and fix them before the event.

Improving human-robot interactions

Understanding and speaking naturally was the most important feature when it comes to Pepper’s interactions, but wasn’t the only one. Listening well to people is just as important a feature for Pepper. From our experience with working at events, we made some observations of how people communicated with Pepper:

• People do not often focus on Pepper’s responses, perhaps because of his novelty.
• Pepper is a great tool for educating, and quizzes were a great way to achieve this as long as they have the right content for users. For example, people in Germany might not know what the region of Wielkopolska is, while natives in Poland would. It’s necessary to adapt the quizzes for cross-cultural uses.
• Feedback from Pepper is crucial: people like to be supported or praised if they make a mistake or succeed.
• The German visitors were very comfortable interacting with Pepper. This could be attributed to prior knowledge because of the widespread usage of Alexa and other voice technologies in Germany.
• The visitors at Hessentag were more used to voice technologies, when Pepper did not understand what they meant, they looked for alternative ways of speaking or asking questions so that Pepper could understand.

Conclusions

Pepper made a great debut in Hessentag, and we were glad to see that lots of visitors wanted to speak and interact with him. Each event with Pepper is special and will have some unique needs, but these cases help us learn everyday to improve Pepper for everyone.

Want to see Pepper in your business or at your next event?

If you have a job in mind for Pepper, let us know how we can create a bespoke Pepper experience for you. Get in touch today!