Musio is a social robot designed by AKA Intelligence, powered by MUSE, an AI engine developed for communication, specifically to help people who wish to improve their English conversational skills.^{[citation needed]} Using learning algorithms, Musio converses with people, and recognizes objects and understands people's facial expressions.^[1][2] Musio also has an emotional engine, which lets it express facial expressions and related sounds. In May 2015, Musio was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, where 201% of the needed funding was raised, resulting in a total of just over $100k.^[3]

Purpose

Musio is designed for educational purposes, specifically to help people who wish to improve their English speaking abilities.^{[citation needed]} Apart from simple questions and answers, a natural conversation can be carried out.^[4] In addition, an assistant OID partner device, named Sophy, provides learning opportunities from a wide range of educational material. Musio includes "Pronunciation Checkup" and "Grammar Correction," among other features, to help with pronunciation and grammar.^{[citation needed]}

Sophy

Sophy is Musio's companion robot that allows Musio to interact with various study materials. Using an optical LED Sensor (OID) and low-energy Bluetooth connection, Sophy can "read" information and send it to Musio. When Sophy needs to communicate to the user, a tactile feedback motor is used. This can be felt in a series of Morse-code taps to convey the message. A Morse-code manual is provided with Sophy.^[5]

MUSE

MUSE is the deep learning-based AI engine for communication that powers Musio.^{[citation needed]} It attempts to understand the user via textual language, oral language, gestures and facial expressions. AKA Intelligence built the machine learning system on the neuroscience to interplay between structure (i.e. rule-based) and antistructure methods (i.e. statistical).^[6]

Specification