Thanks to social robots, the consumer robotics market is poised for tremendous growth beyond our home cleaning, lawn mowing and toy robot friends. But to be intelligent assistants our homes, these robots need to be able to hear, listen, understand and respond to voice commands.

The era of using our hands to control robots is coming to an end, but there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve the voice capabilities of consumer robots.

Todd Mozer, president and CEO of Sensory, joined The Robotics Trends Show to discuss the state of human-robot conversations. Mozer will be part of the “Outlook for Enabling Technologies in the Consumer Robotics Market” panel at RoboBusiness 2016.

Here’s a quick glance at the topics Mozer and I discussed:

• Google Deepmind’s Wavenet is impressive, but not game-changing
• Do robots need a human-like voice?
• Why children struggle to talk with Amazon Echo
• Amazon screwed up making “Alexa” the wake-up phrase
• Improving human-robot conversation is all about the data.

Thanks again to Mozer for coming on The Robotics Trends Show. And if you’re headed to RoboBusiness (Sept. 28-29 at the San Jose Convention Center), make sure to check out his panel about how enabling technologies are currently impacting consumer robots.

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