Meet Mocoro: a robot that attends courses with students and professors and expresses itself through simple facial expressions. Mocoro doesn’t interrupt the lecture but gives the lecturer feedback. The robot uses speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and morphological analysis to understand what people talk about. Here is how the robot works:
Mocoro captures the content of conversation using the Watson Speech-to-Text API available on IBM Bluemix. It counts the number of relevant keywords such as nouns or fillers in a certain period. This way, it can estimate the speed or smoothness of the speech. And if that exceeds the threshold – when someone speaks too quickly, for example – it looks down gradually, giving the lecturer a sad look.
IBM has more on this robot here.