Summary

This chapter introduced NLP for robotics and concentrated on developing a natural language interface for the robot that accomplished three tasks: starting the pick up toys process, telling knock-knock jokes, and listening to knock-knock jokes.

The concepts introduced included recognizing words by phonemes, turning phonemes into graphemes and graphemes into words, parsing intent from sentences, and executing computer programs with a voice interface. We introduced the open source AI engine, Mycroft, which is an AI-based voice assistant program that runs on the Jetson Nano. We also wrote a joke database to entertain small children with some very simple dialog.

In the next chapter, we’ll be learning about robot navigation using landmarks, neural networks, obstacle avoidance, and machine learning.