KAI is a social robot built on the Furhat platform. It can represent a wide variety of people through different faces, voices and languages. Its speech behaviour can be made to seem human by using gestures and facial expressions. At the Institute of Communication Technology (IKT) at the Technical University of Halle-Wittenberg (THU), KAI has so far been developed for two usage scenarios.
The social robot takes over the duties of the Student Service Center staff. It answers all questions related to studying at THU. This can range from very general information, such as the university’s hours of operation, to very specific details—for example, which room the math lecture for the mechanical engineering program is held in during the second semester. KAI is always available to answer any questions, never gets overwhelmed or annoyed, and speaks several languages.
Every user of the THU labs is required to complete a safety orientation. They can do this together with KAI. KAI provides information, asks questions, and even offers a short quiz at the end of the training.
KAI’s knowledge is derived from RAG systems specific to the application. In the THU implementation, an easy-to-use interface was created with numerous configuration options to allow for flexible use of the platform. Currently, KAI’s responses are generated using the Gemma4:e4b language model.
