  Humanoid robots that act as human-robot interfaces equipped with social
skills can assist people in many of their daily activities. Receptionist robots
are one such application where social skills and appearance are of utmost
importance. Many existing robot receptionist systems suffer from high cost and
they do not disclose internal architectures for further development for robot
researchers. Moreover, there does not exist customizable open-source robot
receptionist frameworks to be deployed for any given application. In this paper
we present an open-source robot receptionist intelligence core -- "DEVI"(means
'lady' in Sinhala), that provides researchers with ease of creating customized
robot receptionists according to the requirements (cost, external appearance,
and required processing power). Moreover, this paper also presents details on a
prototype implementation of a physical robot using the DEVI system. The robot
can give directional guidance with physical gestures, answer basic queries
using a speech recognition and synthesis system, recognize and greet known
people using face recognition and register new people in its database, using a
self-learning neural network. Experiments conducted with DEVI show the
effectiveness of the proposed system.
