QTrobot: Intelligent Meeting Assistant with Real-Time Image Recommendations

Use Case: Enhancing virtual and in-person meetings with relevant visual information, powered by social robotics.

The Challenge: Keeping audiences engaged and providing supplementary information during presentations can be challenging, especially in virtual settings. Text-based recommendations can be distracting and require significant preparation from the speaker.

The Solution: Researchers have developed IRRMA (Image Recommender Robot Meeting Assistant), a system featuring the expressive QTrobot that provides real-time image recommendations to meeting participants based on the speaker’s speech. This innovative approach leverages QTrobot’s capabilities (microphone, processing power, and Wi-Fi) and natural language processing techniques to enrich presentations visually.

How it Works with QTrobot:

• Real-Time Speech Analysis: QTrobot listens to the speaker through its microphone, using speech-to-text technology to transcribe the spoken content.
• Keyword Extraction: A custom algorithm extracts key terms from the transcript in real time.
• Intelligent Image Search: These keywords are used to search for relevant images within a curated “whitelist” of online resources, such as Wikipedia Commons.
• Engaging Visual Delivery: When a suitable image is found, QTrobot displays it on its tablet screen and makes an arm gesture to attract the audience’s attention, providing visual context without distracting from the speaker.
• Versatile Application: IRRMA can be used in online, offline, and hybrid meeting scenarios, with QTrobot potentially sharing its screen in virtual meetings.

Key Benefits:

• Enhanced Information Retrieval: Helps participants better understand and retain information by providing relevant visual aids.
• Increased Audience Engagement: QTrobot’s presence and dynamic recommendations are more attention-grabbing than static on-screen suggestions.
• Reduced Speaker Preparation: The system can search a vast database of images without requiring extensive pre-loading of resources by the presenter.
• Non-Distracting Information: Images can be viewed while participants continue to listen to the speaker.
• Improved Meeting Quality: Adds valuable references and illustrations to presentations in real time.

The Future: This research demonstrates the potential of social robots like QTrobot to act as intelligent meeting assistants, with future developments to include multimedia recommendations and support for multi-speaker interactions.