Prateek, a 13-year-old boy from Tamil Nadu’s Chennai, claims to have created an emotional robot. The boy has named his robot ‘Raffi,’ and it is said to understand scolding and other human emotions in addition to responding to general questions. “If you scold him, he won’t answer your queries until you are sorry. It can even understand you if you are sad,” Prateek told.
Netizens praised the boy’s abilities and praised his efforts after the news agency shared their photos on Twitter. In the images, the robot is painted white, has a head, and a screen installed in its torso. The robot also has a camera to detect faces.
India is a land of talents
“India has so much talent. In next 10 years I see it unfolding as tech will reach to last mile of entire population giving them power to learn and develop,” a user commented on the pictures. Some users lauded the achievement of the boy at such a young age. “I was reading latest editions of comic books at 13 and there’s this boy making robots at 13! Proud and impressed,” another wrote. “Stoked to see young folks investing time to learn and build complex engineering projects,” a twitter user wrote.
A user tweeted, “I feel, it has been fed with data of faces and voices, like this is angry face this is happy face and also with voice, so some training might have been done on that. Vision training or something like that. Whatever, doing this at 13 is still a big task.” “Billions of rows of texts couldn’t create emotions in a google AI but 13 yo somehow managed to train a model with emotions,” one user tweeted.
Explaining how the robot might work, a user wrote, “The CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) he used for tracking his emotions and feeding it to the robot. And for the robot to have emotions he may have implemented a chatbot-like feature instead of text using audio/video.”
