First robot to participate in a rap battle

The first robot to participate in a real time interactive rap battle against a human is Shimon, a robot developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology by Gil Weinberg. In a video published on 24 February 2020, Shimon and rapper Dash Smith collaborate in a performance where the robot is able to listen to the human rapper, understand his lyrics, and respond to them in a unique and creative way using a neural network and voice synthesis software.

Shimon started as a marimba-playing robot that could perform jazz improvisations alongside humans. Within the last several years, the robot has begun to compose music and songs complete with lyrics that it sings in a unique voice created through a deep learning–based voice synthesizer. Real time rap battles represent a particular challenge, because the robot must be able to use input from a human opponent as a seed to dynamically develop new lyrics in a way that makes sense while also incorporating rhyme. Since Shimon’s neural network was trained on a comprehensive dataset of uncensored hip-hop lyrics, its creators had to write a separate script to censor out the explicit language that the robot often attempts to use.