Guide dogs are powerful allies, leading the visually impaired safely to their destinations, but they can’t talk with their owners—until now. Using large language models, a team of researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York has created a talking robot guide dog system that determines an ideal route and safely guides users to their destination, offering real-time feedback along the way.

The paper, “From Woofs to Words: Towards Intelligent Robotic Guide Dogs with Verbal Communication,” was presented at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026), held January 20–27 in Singapore. It is also available on the arXiv preprint server.

“For this work, we’re demonstrating an aspect of the robotic guide dog that is more advanced than biological guide dogs,” said Shiqi Zhang, an associate professor at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s School of Computing. “Real dogs can understand around 20 commands at best. But for robotic guide dogs, you can just put GPT-4 with voice commands. Then it has very strong language capabilities.”