Kismet was a robotic head built by Cynthia Breazeal at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in the group led by Rodney Brooks, in the late 1990s. MIT described it as “a robotic head that can interact with humans in a human-like way via myriad facial expressions, head positions, and tones of voice.” With moving eyes, eyebrows, ears, and lips, Kismet could display emotion-like states such as happiness, fear, and disgust, and could turn toward and respond to a person’s face and voice. A bank of some fifteen computers ran its perception, analysis, and behavior.
Kismet’s purpose was not to do a task but to study interaction itself. Breazeal’s stated goal was “to build a socially intelligent machine that learns things as we learn them, through social interactions” - the idea that a robot might pick up skills the way an infant does, by engaging with caregivers, rather than only through explicit programming. Kismet became one of the founding projects of what is now called social robotics, the study of machines that read and respond to human social cues.
The line runs forward from Kismet to today’s expressive consumer and service robots and to research on robots as tutors, companions, and assistants. Breazeal later founded the company Jibo around a social home robot, carrying the same premise: that for robots to live among people, they need to be sociable, not just capable.