INTRODUCING FURHAT

FurhatOS is Furhat Robotics Operating System for social robotics. The primary duty of FurhatOS is providing the runtime environment that enables sophisticated social robotics applications. It also includes a set of modular subsystems that handle facial animation, motion functions, sensory perception, audio processing, vision, I/O, cloud service integration, and operations & maintenance functions.

Furhat Robotics releases FurhatOS updates on a monthly cadence.

FurhatOS is distributed as a structured set of Linux packages supporting standard Linux package management operations and commands.

Every Furhat Robots has a number of skills or capabilities which are used to create social robotics applications.

A Virtual Furhat provides a simulated environment in which the skill can be run, and

where all of it's features can be logged, tested, and viewed - for demonstrations and production-ready social robotics applications.

Yes! Furhat SDK (software developers kit) includes all of the developer tools, API’s, tutorials and documentation enabling developers to create skills for the Furhat platform. 

Developers can develop skills using the Kotlin programming language and hook into the rich API set offered by FurhatOS. 

Furhat SDK also provides IDE integration, and a Virtual Furhat environment that enables skills to be developed, hosted, executed, and debugged on the developer’s workstation before they are deployed to a physical robot system for final testing and deployment.

The Furhat Robot has a swappable human-like face mask which is very expressive.

Each Furhat Robot is shipped with one adult face model with 10 individual textures, which allows for a wide array of male and female character faces.

Furhat Robotics will extend the standard set of face models over time.

Every Furhat Robot has a number of built-in gestures which will be extended.

Currently, the following gestures are supported:

• Big Smile
• Blink
• Frown
• Brow Raise
• Close Eyes
• Open Eyes
• Express Anger
• Express Disgust
• Express Fear
• Express Sad
• Gaze Away
• Nod
• Oh!
• Roll
• Shake
• Smile
• Surprise
• Thoughtful
• Wink

Furhat Robotics plans to release additional tools that enable robot owners and designers to create their own custom gestures and easily deploy these to robots.

FurhatOS currently supports 40+ spoken languages including male, female and (in selected cases) child variants. This list is continuously being extended.  

FurhatOS supports both on-board voices (from Acapela & Cereproc), as well as cloud based voices from Amazon Polly*. FurhatOS has specific pluggability support which enables us to easily extend to additional cloud based voices as needed.

The following languages are supported:

• Arabic
• Catalan
• Chinese (Mandarin)
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (5 variants)
• Faroese
• Finnish
• French (French/Canadian)
• German
• Greek
• Hindi
• Icelandic
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Portuguese/Brazilian)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Sami
• Spanish (European/Mexican/US)
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Welsh

*including Neural and Newscaster style voices

Every Furhat Robot recognises 120+ spoken languages and variants using sophisticated Speech Recognition skills built into FurhatOS. 

Out of the box support for both Google Cloud Speech-To-Text as well as Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Speech-to-Text services.

The following languages are recognised:

• Afrikaans
• Amharic
• Arabic (18 variants)
• Armenian
• Bahasa Indonesian
• Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia)
• Basque (Spain)
• Bengali (Bangladesh/India)
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (Chinese Mandarin zh-CN)
• Chinese (Chinese Mandarin Simplif. - zh)
• Chinese (HK Mandarin Simplif. - zh-HK)
• Chinese (TW Mandarin Trad. - zh-TW)
• Chinese (Cantonese/Traditional - HK)
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch (Netherlands, Belgium)
• English (16 variants)
• Faroese
• Filipino
• Finnish
• French (3 variants)
• Galician (Spain)
• Georgian
• German
• Greek
• Gujarati (Indian)
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Icelandic
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Javanese
• Kannada (India)
• Korean (South Korea)
• Khmer (Cambodia)
• Lao (Laos)
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Malay (Malaysia)
• Malayalam (India)
• Marathi (India)
• Nepali
• Norwegian (Bokmål)
• Persian (Iran)
• Polish
• Portuguese (Portugal/Brazil)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Sami
• Serbian
• Sinhala (Sri Lanka)
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish (20 variants)
• Sundanese (Indonesia)
• Swahili (Tanzania/Kenya)
• Swedish (4 variants)
• Tamil (India/Malaysia)
• Tamil (4 variants)
• Telegu (India)
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukranian
• Urdu (India, Pakistan)
• Vietnamese
• Urdu (Pakistan/India)
• Welsh
• Zulu