The Physical AI Era

How we build it

• 01

  Persona specification

  Voice, when to speak first, how to decline and the range of emotion—written down as a spec your teams can build against.

• 02

  Native localization

  The same character, rewritten by native writers so it sounds right in every language and culture.

• 03

  Multimodal dialogue data

  Training data for dialogue that works together with voice, facial expression and motion.

• 04

  Consistency testing

  Evaluation sets that confirm the character holds before and after every model or device change.

• MITRobots

  Letting a robot look while it talks, through tool calls

  Dong Won Lee, Cynthia Breazeal, Hae Won Park et al. · arXiv 2026

  The authors propose a minimal system in which a real-time multimodal LLM calls tools to look at people and objects and scan the scene mid-conversation. On a Jibo robot across six scenarios, tool-decision accuracy was 0.72 for OpenAI and 0.77 for Gemini.

  ddai insight

  Looking less isn't a safe default for a talking robot. A model can be right most of the time it looks and still miss many moments that called for a look.

  A Modern System Recipe for Situated Embodied Human–Robot Conversation with Real-Time Multimodal LLMs and Tool-Calling

  Read the paper›

  Humanoid
• Cornell · TRIRobots

  Eventual success restores a robot's perceived reliability

  Cornell University · Toyota Research Institute · Andrew Violette, Guy Hoffman, Hadas Kress-Gazit et al. · 2026

  In an online study, 326 participants watched a robot do a pick-and-place task and bet on whether it would succeed. Mistakes, such as picking the wrong object, hurt perceived reliability less than slips or freezes, and a success right after any failure brought it back to the no-failure level.

  ddai insight

  Whether a robot seems reliable turns less on the moment it fails than on how the task ends. In conversation, too, an AI that corrects itself and finishes may earn as much trust as one that never errs.

  Impact of Different Failures on a Robot's Perceived Reliability

  Read the paper›

  Humanoid
• MITRobots

  When a robot tells someone else's story, and says so

  MIT Media Lab · Jocelyn Shen, Cynthia Breazeal, Hae Won Park et al. · HRI 2025

  The researchers placed a storytelling social robot in 40 homes for two weeks. When the robot said the stories were someone else's, participants showed significantly larger changes in social connection and compassionate love for humanity than when it told them as its own.

  ddai insight

  The same story lands differently when an AI tells it as its own and when it says whose it is. For an AI that passes stories along, naming the source is as much a part of its character as its voice.

  Social Robots as Social Proxies for Fostering Connection and Empathy Towards Humanity

  Read the paper›

  HumanoidHumanities

• 02

  Dialogue for a wearable robot

  Expertise

  Robot voice and situational utterance design

  Method

  For each use scene, design when the robot speaks first and when it answers

  Deliverables

  Dialogue scenarios and utterance data

  Humanoid