Social robots are a new type of physical computer interface designed to be used in social contexts, to interact with people. The goal is for them to interact with us humans as we do with each other, by listening, speaking, and expressing some degree of emotion. Verbal communication and social interaction are skills we have evolved over thousands of years and as they come so naturally to us, there is little to no learning curve. By communicating with us the way we do with each other, social robots have the ability to connect with us in deeper and more meaningful ways, potentially removing the barriers between humanity and technology.

This is a question that is fundamentally about User Experience. A physically-embodied robot provides a more immersive experience than a chatbot or a smart speaker. Furhat has the capability to look the user in the eyes, share a smile, and create a sense of shared experience and connection that is difficult to replicate over video or voice-only interaction. The core foundation of a social robot is that it is social – in other words, it allows the user to engage socially and emotionally with it, as if they were talking to a human in front of them.

There are many distinctive factors that make Furhat different from other robots in the market. A few of the most important points are listed below:
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Human communication:
Most robots the world has seen so far have been focused on movement and dexterity. Our robot is a social robot with the sole purpose of communicative interaction.

‍Human face:
Many other social robots have a simplified toy-like interface and not a human face.

‍Unique personas:
Furhat boasts a relaxed human quality that you don’t get from other social robots – put simply, it feels like you are actually talking to a person rather than a machine.

‍Customizable mask:
Furhat has a customizable silica mask which uses projected facial animations in the form of features and expressions to deliver those human-like qualities – each Furhat robot can be customized in several ways to create unique characters with their own personality and quirks.

‍World-leading software:
Furhat’s ‘brain’ is powered by a custom state-of-the-art conversational intelligence software. The Furhat Software includes an Software Development Kit (SDK) which can be used to program the robot to participate in social human interactions.

Furhat is a new user interface, that provides a vastly unique user experience in social and physical environments. As well as bringing commercial benefits, particularly in the time of a pandemic, Furhat’s interactions are proven to be memorable, something that will set your brand apart from competitors.

The Furhat platform is highly flexible and extremely customizable, enabling you to create applications for a wide variety of use cases. You can develop an application to handle a multitude of user requests, ensuring that each customer experiences a positive and useful interaction with the robot.Just like mobile devices, once an application is created it can be deployed across many Furhat robot devices.The application can also be translated into any of the world’s 40 most common languages, meaning that the robot will be able to serve most users in their native language.

Absolutely. One of the main features of the Furhat robot is its extreme customizability. You can create your own physical mask, animated face and TTS (text-to-speech) voice. The robot is shipped with pre-loaded animations and voices in the world’s 40 most common languages, so you have a wide variety of personas to choose from to begin with. You can also add external accessories such as a wig, scarf or hat to even further connect with your brand. For some inspiration, check out how Bandai Namco and Deutsche Bahn customized their Furhat robots to match their brand identity.

Yes, you can! This is quite common to do, particularly when deploying Furhat in a public space. We have made sure that external devices are compatible with the robot, to ensure you can for example use larger speakers if necessary in noisy environments, or perhaps link a touchscreen to offer a secondary interface.

The robot currently speaks around 40 of the world’s most common languages. In most languages, there are both male & female voices, as well as varying dialects. We collaborate with third party voice providers, so we are always building on our library of available voices.

Yes, we have a virtual Furhat. This is only for development use, not commercial deployment. You can find out more about the Furhat Software Development Kit and the virtual Furhat here.

Yes, we have existing customers who are already giving a physical embodiment to their virtual chatbot.

Yes, it is entirely possible to integrate Furhat with backend systems. This allows the robot to book reservations or meetings, access information about a particular customer or automatically update digital records, as just a couple of examples.

The Furhat robot comes with a user-friendly Software Development Kit (SDK). The SDK includes the custom made dialogue framework that is written in a modern Java-dialect called Kotlin. The dialogue framework is well documented on docs.furhat.io with an extensive intro to social robots and plenty of examples to start from. The dialogue framework is based on hierarchical statecharts with an intuitive and easy to use custom Natural Language Understanding engine. Anyone with a bit of general programming experience and experience in creating conversational applications should find the SDK easy to use. Read more about necessary competences to build Furhat skills.

The Furhat Robot does not automatically log any user data. All data logging is managed and performed by the developer. All video data is processed on-board the robot, and does not allow any data to be used by third-party suppliers supporting its features.

No, you can run Furhat in a limited mode without network connectivity for presentations or demos for example. However, you will not be able to run an interaction that requires the robot to understand what people say – as the robot uses cloud services for speech recognition.

This depends on your purpose and vision with using our robot. For experimental and research purposes (e.g. universities and innovation labs) we sell the robot, whereas robots that are to be used for commercial purposes are leased on a monthly basis which includes a strong package of support, maintenance and full warranty.

We recommend that you have an in-house development team to create your application(s), however we do work alongside the world’s top development agencies who can support you.Experience in developing conversational applications is recommended, but not required.Depending on your idea and use case, continuous improvements based on feedback and user input can be continued throughout the application lifecycle.

We offer basic technical onboarding training for all new customers. Our Developer Documentation Site and YouTube channel also includes extensive guides and tutorials which are freely available at all times. Custom training packages or consulting services throughout a project are available for a fee, depending on your needs.

The robot is shipped with several demo applications, which provide inspiration for your own application development and allow you to interact with the robot out of the box. There are also tutorials and example applications available on our GitHub profile.If you require domain expertise, we work alongside the world’s top development agencies who can support you in developing your application.

The Furhat robot does not collect and store any user data, unless specifically programmed to do so by the user of the robot. Furthermore, the robot does not share any user data with Furhat Robotics, and by default does not store any user data on Furhat Robotics servers. The robot makes use of third-party cloud services for Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis, the audio files are sent encrypted to the service providers and we prohibit the service providers to store or make use of the data to train their models. For more details, see Furhat Data Privacy and Security.

The Furhat Platform use third-party services for Speech Recognition (Google and/or Microsoft), Speech Synthesis (Acapela, Amazon and/or Microsoft, and Computer Vision (OpenVino).

Yes, the robot is using cloud service for Speech Recognition (Google and/or Microsoft), and Speech Synthesis (Amazon and/or Microsoft). The Furhat Platform also offer a cloud-based logging tool.