Explore the Furhat Robotics resource hub, always available to guide you through your robot experience

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.

For extra reading, visit our “Should social robots have touch screens?” blog post.

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.

You can view the latest library of available voices in our Technical Product Overview.

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. Read the Furhat Platform Data Security & Privacy.

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.

The Furhat Software Development Kit (SDK) supports development on Windows, MacOS or Linux. The SDK only requires a reasonably capable developer class workstation. As a guideline, a system with an i7 class CPU, a minimum of 8GB free RAM, and a minimum of 150GB of free disk space is recommended.

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. You can contact us here for more clarification on costs and available packages.

The length and complexity of an implementation project will differ based on the scope of use case, number of robots, team size etc., but it is common for most projects follow the path of the below stages:

• Acquire a Furhat robot.
• Develop a new tailored application for approx. 2-5 months.
• Deploy and test the pilot application in a live environment for approx. 1-2 months.
• Improve and iterate based on feedback for approx. 2-3 months.
• Deploy a permanent installation in a live environment.

 
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.

• Speech recognition for 124 languages (including regional variants)
• Speech synthesis with 197 different voices in 31 languages
• 4 masks (adult, child, anime, dog) with 22 adult faces
• 20 facial gestures (from 52 parameters)
• Web interface to monitor and manage wizard-of-Oz interactions
• A short list of common intents and entities for English, Spanish, Mandarin, German and Swedish.
• Tutorial and examples skills
• Example skill flows for the visual prototyping tool Blockly

All our clients are welcome to contact us through our Support portal, and we also have an open community with global Furhat users where you can ask other developers for advice.

As a leasing client, you automatically have access to our premium support package with faster response and resolution time, live technical remote support, tips and advice to improve your application.

If you have purchased the robot, there are additional support packages available on an annual basis for an additional fee.

Contact us for a quote and more details regarding support packages.

As a Furhat customer, you will be eligible for frequent software updates, roughly every month. These are free and available in our Developer Documentation site, and we recommend every robot owner to keep a look out for these and ensure that their robot is updated with the latest software version to take part of all the new features that are continuously developed.

The hardware does not require much maintenance, however you can read tips about caring for your robot in our Robot Owners Guide (page 36), covering environmental, handling, cleaning and transportation of the robot.

In case of any issues or damages with the robot hardware, we offer warranty and support packages to cover all eventualities.

This feature is not currently available. We believe that there are better technologies out there that specialize in this space. Our main focus is on interactions in environments with the need for a physical embodiment.

Yes, this is possible via a number of ways. Given the current requirement for virtual meetings, we are offering frequent online live demo sessions, hosted by our Furhateers. This is the nearest thing to meeting Furhat in real-life. The 45-minute session provides you with the opportunity to see Furhat in action, view a brief demonstration and ask questions to a member of our team. You can book a demo here.

Once it becomes safe, we will be attending events again. Keep an eye on our social media channels to see where we will be in the world, and reach out to drop by for a demo.

You can also contact our resellers for a meeting if this makes sense, depending on your location. You can view our list of global partners here.

For technical information, see our Developer Documentation site. For any other questions, contact sales@furhatrobotics.com.

Yes, you can hire a robot specifically for an event. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are now also available to provide virtual demos and presentations for events.

Please submit a contact form, and we will be in touch with you soon.

Feel free to email us directly at sales@furhatrobotics.com with any further questions and we will get back to you shortly.

The robot requires internet connection for the speech recognition. For speaking, the robot have the option to use on-board speech synthesiser, pre-recorded audio files or a speech synthesiser cloud service.

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.