Worldhat: A Humanoid Social Robot Interpreter for Multilingual Dyadic Conversations

Language barriers continue to hinder non-native speakers’ access to essential public services, where effective communication is crucial. While mobile translation apps are common, they often fall short in socially complex settings due to the lack of non-verbal cues, disrupting conversational flow and weakening interpersonal connection. This demonstration introduces Worldhat, a humanoid robot interpreter that supports real-time multilingual communication through speech translation and embodied interaction. Built on the Furhat SDK, Worldhat integrates speech recognition, machine translation, and speech output, simulating the social behaviors of a human interpreter. It highlights how embodied interaction can enhance translation systems. Future work includes automatic language detection and deeper exploration of robot embodiment.