In this episode, we talk to Stefan Scherer (CTO of Embodied) about why he decided to focus on the more nuanced challenge of developing children’s social-emotional skills. Stefan takes us through how encouraging children to mentor Moxie (a friendly robot) through social interaction helps them develop their interpersonal relationships. We dive into the relevance of scripted versus unscripted conversation in different AI technologies, and how Embodied taught Moxie to define abstract concepts such as "kindness". 

Key Points From This Episode:

• Welcome to Stefan Scherer, CTO of Embodied and lead researcher and developer of Embodied's SocialX™ technology, Moxie.
• The goal of Embodied: using a natural mode of communication to support children’s social development. 
• Mentoring Moxie: how Moxie teaches children social-emotional learning without being a teacher. 
• Why Stefan and Embodied focused on the challenge of social-emotional skills, not STEM. 
• Developing a technology that captures the infinite answers to social-emotional questions: using neural networks and sentiment analysis.
• How using Few-shot learning reduced the amount of data needed to train Moxie.
• Why it's important to make the transition between freer- and scripted conversations seamless.
• How the percentage of scripted versus non-scripted conversation differs based on the context of the technology.  
• Discover how Moxie adapts to children’s changing needs and desires. 
• How Moxie as a springboard in teaching children to form long-term relationships. 
• The hardware behind Moxie: the ethical considerations around home devices, and data protection.
• Why Moxie looks the way it does: making it affordable. 

Tweetables:

“Human behavior is very complex, and it gives us a window into our soul. We can understand so much more than just language from human behavior, we can understand an individual's wellbeing and their abilities to communicate with others.” — Stefan Scherer [0:01:04]

"It is not sufficient to work on the easy challenges at first and then expand from there. No, as a startup you have to tackle the hard ones first because that's where you set yourself apart from the rest." — Stefan Scherer [0:04:53]

“Moxie comes into the world of the child with the mission to basically learn how to be a good friend to humans. And Moxie puts the child into this position of teaching Moxie about how to do that.” — Stefan Scherer [0:17:40]

"One of the most important aspects of Moxie is that Moxie doesn't serve as the destination, Moxie is really a springboard into life." — Stefan Scherer [0:18:29]

“We did not want to overengineer Moxie, we really wanted to basically afford the ability to have a conversation, to be able to multimodally interact, and yet be as frugal with the amount of concepts that we added or the amount of capabilities that we added.” — Stefan Scherer [0:27:17]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

See Moxie in Action

Stefan Scherer on LinkedIn

Embodied Website