The Future-BOT

In the last few weeks, I picked up a new hobby - paper flowers! I wanted to incorporate paper flowers into my assignment to create a semi-autonomous robot.

I wanted to base my interaction around what it feels like to look at a bouquet of flowers. When I look at flowers, it brings an instant inner peace to me personally. It calms my mind and grounds me to a little bit of nature. I wanted the voice interaction with the robot to reflect this peace and encourage that mindset.

My aim was to create a mindful voice interaction that helps ground and center me in moments when I am feeling anxious or dealing with self-doubt and other negative mind spirals. The “robot” uses a presence sensor to detect when I, or someone else, approaches it. It then prompts you to tell it what's on your mind. Based on your response, it gives you a response to help you down a more positive train of thought. The interaction is meant to be calm and reassuring.

Voice: I used a custom voice from ElevenLabs. I wanted the voice to be a soothing woman’s voice. I found that the free voices available didn’t quite have the tone I was looking for, so I decided to upgrade my account so that I could have access to more voice options.

The voice that I used was: Rhythm - Calm & Friendly Meditation (Voice ID: 7AvtJrjTNyBhBxEvNPIZ)

To give the robot a sense of autonomy, the system will work by recognizing keywords and matching them to an affirmation category. If a keyword is triggered, the system will respond with a random affirmation in that category.

The flow for the interaction looks like this:

approach → flowers sense presence →greeting + prompt → user speaks → affirmation plays

Greeting: