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Robot Tutor Musio is here replace your language teacher

Education & training industry is making use of technology in many ways. While many youngsters and teachers are acquainted with online learning and eLearning, the next revolution is coming in the form of robots. An adorable robot named Musio is here to help you with your language skills. After successfully completing its Crowdfunding campaign recently, it was launched officially at a price tag of JPY 98,000 in Japan last week. One can buy Muiso easily via Amazon Japan, Softbank’s marketplace and through some offline retail stores.

As of now Musio’s capabilities include small talks, answering simple logical questions, admitting it’s fault or lack of knowledge and most important one is correcting language flaws. It can detect and notify wrong pronunciations and wrong grammar usage etc. This robot’s face and heart is made of interactive touch screens meant to show a range of emotions to connect on a deeper level with users. Moreover, one can even read books, play games; developed by an educational publisher Gakken, and go through menu using these touchscreens.

But, what’s all this fuss about? It looks and functions like a high-tech talking doll with some grammar sense. No, comparing Musio to a toy is simply underrating its capabilities. Musio’s parent company is an AI venture, AKA Study. That said, Artificial Intelligence is going to play a major role in further development of this robot. Although API’s are available free of cost from major players in AI industry like Google, Baidu, Apple and Amazon for development purpose, but AKA decided to build its own proprietary engine specifically for Musio robot.  Now that brings ability to recognize a particular user, referring back to his older conversations to analyze his growth rate and potential.  Musio robot might be able to find out the weak areas while learning language together and then design further conversations to help in advancing altogether.

On asking Jung, co-founder AKA, why he considers Musio a robot as it does not have any moving parts, he said “We put a motor system in there. If you need a dynamic part, you can add it in the future,” the CEO explained. The brand is planning to add movable components to the robot afterwards as future updates increasing its functionality even further. One of his visions for Musio is of a “companion” that’s always there for elderly people to keep them connected socially with rest of the worldand helping them in living a healthy independent life. He said there is a huge demand for social robots in Japan justifying their focus on the market.

AKA study has already raised 10.7 million in seed and series A funding. That’s a lot of money going straight into development. Moreover, brands like Gakken, LG UPlus and Nexon, a gaming company, are backing AKA with Musio’s project. Just to inform you, the first batch of Musio robots is already sold out! You have to wait for the restock to get one in your hands.