Zeus 2.0 Humanoid Robot Is Learning How to Walk — and Hold a “Conversation”

While science fiction has long portrayed robots taking over the world, they aren’t always the best at communicating fluidly with meat-people. Such is the case of the metallic Zeus 2.0 robot on display in the video below, as it can both understand human speech, and reply back with… something.

Such fascinating dialogs on display, include creator Luis asking “What’s your name,” and Zeus responding with, “My name is Zeus.” Zeus is also shown inquiring about Luis’ favorite movie. When he reponds that it’s The Matrix, the robot then replies with “I wasn’t that impressed with the special effects, also the plot was not deep.” While that’s funny to some, Zeus is only learning to walk, so if its conversation partner is deeply offended, it will have a hard time getting away. On the other hand, it can move its arms, hands and head quite well, and possesses a solid-looking metallic body, so perhaps it’s not entirely defenseless!

To pull off this robot’s movements and speech, the robot uses an AAEON UP board, along with an Arduino Mega and Intel RealSense camera SR300. It also features CMUSPinx for voice recognition, eSpeak for text-to-speech, and an AIML chatbot to interact with a human… or even another robot? Notably, there’s a dog companion called DigiBite in the works was well, so maybe we’ll see both stomping around in the future!