For now, robots, especially used in factories, are what are called cold machines. Even equipped with two arms, a mouth and two artificial eyes, they remain very inhuman. Japanese researchers therefore want to slip them a touch of humor to facilitate their relationship with humans.
The idea of scientists from Kyoto University is to create robots capable of empathy. With artificial intelligence, we can already teach a machine to generate an automatic response to questions. Want to know where Restaurant X is? The robot searches through its data, then responds and explains the way.
The researchers now want to go further: teach the robot to hold a real conversation, and this involves simulating a form of emotion in reaction to what you say, in particular laughter. To trigger it, it implies learning humor. Robots do not yet know how to analyze words to know if an anecdote is funny or not. But on the other hand, they are able to analyze the intonation of your voice and produce an appropriate reaction.
For this, researchers at Kyoto University have reprogrammed a humanoid that already exists: “Erica”. He looks like a young brunette Asian woman wearing a white blouse. They organized in their laboratory, 82 conversations between male students and female students who answered them through Erica.
The men recounted moments of life, stories and experiences by speaking directly to the robot. The young women, seated in another room, responded through the machine’s voice synthesizer. Sometimes they laughed out loud, other times they snickered. A normal conversation. The artificial intelligence recorded everything and then analyzed it.
They thus left the machine to continue to discuss alone with the students and it started to sneer or giggle automatically when it perceived a laughter in the human. She also started making little sounds, like “humshums“, to encourage the human to continue his story.
Provoking laughter in a robot is good, but why? These researchers want to develop humanoids capable of accompanying humans in difficulty, such as elderly people who live alone. It can also be people suffering from Alzheimer’s or a form of dementia who need constant intellectual stimulation.
In order for the robots to possibly be associated with care, they must be able to converse naturally. Learning to laugh is just the beginning. Scientists think they still have at least 10 or 20 years of work before they can generate robots capable of naturally discussing everything and nothing