Nadine
Lifelike social humanoid robot (not made by Hanson Robotics)
Contact for pricing
Nadine is a lifelike social humanoid robot modelled after Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, designed for natural face-to-face interaction with realistic skin, hair, and articulated hands. Contrary to the premise of this query, Nadine is not a Hanson Robotics product: its physical hardware was built by the Japanese firm Kokoro, while its software and behaviour were developed by Professor Thalmann's research teams at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and later at MIRALab, University of Geneva. It can hold autonomous multilingual conversations, recognise people, simulate emotions through facial expressions and gestures, and remember prior interactions.
Released: 2013
RoboZaps evaluation note
Buyer-side view of Nadine
RoboZaps reviews Nadine as part of a broader robot shortlist, not as a single-vendor pitch. Buyers should compare availability, deployment maturity, support terms, integration work, and total cost before committing.
- Spec sources
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- Last verified
- Not verified
- Availability
- announced
- Support caveat
- Verify local training, maintenance, parts, and uptime terms.
Best fit
Teams that need to compare Nadine against othersocial robots options with deployment readiness, commercial terms, and support assumptions made explicit.
Not best fit
Buyers who need a guaranteed off-the-shelf deployment before confirming current availability, integrator coverage, site readiness, and post-sale support ownership.
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Overview
Nadine is a lifelike social humanoid robot designed to interact with people through natural conversation, facial expression, and gesture. It is modelled physically on Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, giving it realistic skin, hair, and articulated hands that support human-like movement and grasping.
Despite being grouped here under Hanson Robotics, Nadine is not in fact a Hanson Robotics robot. Its physical body and head were manufactured by the Japanese animatronics firm Kokoro, while the artificial intelligence, behaviour, and social capabilities were developed by Professor Thalmann's teams, first at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and, more recently, at MIRALab at the University of Geneva, where work has focused on integrating large language models.
Nadine is positioned as a socially intelligent companion and assistant. It can answer questions autonomously in several languages, recognise people it has met before, simulate mood and emotion, and recall the content of past conversations, which lets it sustain flowing, personalised interaction over time.
Key Features
- Lifelike human appearance with realistic skin, hair, and articulated, dexterous hands
- Autonomous multilingual conversation with natural speech and dialogue
- Facial recognition and the ability to remember people and prior interactions
- Emotion and mood simulation expressed through facial expressions and gestures
- Deployed in real-world roles including customer service, elderly companionship, and reception
Videos
Specifications
Connectivity
| Communication | Natural language processing, speech recognition |
Mechanics
| Degrees of Freedom | 27 |
| Locomotion | Stationary |
Sensing
| Sensors | 3D cameras, microphones |
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