Kismet is a robot made in the late 1990's at MIT with auditory, visual and expressive systems intended to participate in human social interaction and to demonstrate simulated human emotion and appearance. In order for Kismet to properly interact with human beings, it contains input devices that give it auditory, visual, and proprioception abilities. Kismet simulates emotion through various facial expressions, vocalizations, and movement. Facial expressions are created through movements of the ears, eyebrows, eyelids, lips, jaw, and head.

Four color CCD cameras mounted on a stereo active vision head and two wide field of view cameras allow Kismet to decide what to pay attention to and to estimate distances. A .5 inch CCD foveal camera with an 8 mm focal length lense is used for higher resolution post-attentional processing, such as eye detection.

By wearing a small microphone, a user can influence Kismet's behaviour. An auditory signal is carried into a 500 MHz PC running Linux, using software developed at MIT by the Spoken Language Systems Group that can process real-time, low-level speech patterns. A 450 MHz PC running NT processes these features in real-time to recognize the spoken affective intent of the caregiver.

In addition to the computers mentioned above, there are 4 Motorola 68332s, 9 400MHz PCs, and another 500 MHz PC. Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio. Robosapiens. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000. Pg. 66

Maxon DC servo motors with high resolution optical encoders are positioned to give Kismet three degrees of eye movement, which allow it to control gaze direction and gives Kismet the ability to move and orient its eyes like a human. This allows Kismet to simulate human visual behaviors. It also allows humans to assign a communicative value to eye movements and to allow Kismet to focus on what it deems important in its field of vision.

Some critics consider it an ELIZA-style device which relies on clever pattern recognition and output to fool users into thinking the machine possesses intelligence that isn't really there.

Kismet has been featured on NBC as well as Discover magazine and is the project of Cynthia Breazeal.