World's First Arabic Speaking Robot Constructed in Gulf

United Arab Emirates University is the place where the world's first Arabic-speaking interactive robot was created. This unique robot is named after a 11th Century Muslim doctor and philosopher Ibn Sina, commonly known as Avicenna. The Greek professor and lab director, Nicholas Mavrides declared that, the human-like Ibn Sina can function as a salesmen, receptionist or even as a shopping assistant in malls.

They say they have many reasons to name the robot after Ibn Sina. To begin with, first they wanted a name that can be easily identified by the people of the region. Second, they wanted a name that carries values which are important for the region, and pertaining to science, philosophy and many more...

Mavrides said that the Ibn Sina robot was custom-built for an interactive theater in which scientists "play with the interactions between robots, virtual characters and different forms of telepresence". The intention behind such idea was to focus attention on the arabic culture and ancient history with the help of robotic technology. This would particularly be helpful in imparting knowledge to children about Ibn Sina's scientific discoveries and research.

In an effort to make the robot more interactive, the UAE-based lab plays host to scientists from Pakistan, Iran and Greece. The team is now working on making the robot more intelligent. Along with the Ibn Sina Project the Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory is making developments in Facebots Project. Facebot Project is about robots with dialogue capabilities, these bots are created using face recognition technology and also the data available on social networking sites suck as Facebook.com. The Facebots project has been awarded by Microsoft.

The voice was designed by a French company called Acapela and it took about nine years to develop it. The Ibn Sina robot's voice is called Nizar, as Nizar in arabic means to keep the conversation flowing in a natural and fluent way.