Teach a robot when to smile

Scientists are currently developing an AI system that recreates the nuances of a human’s expressions by teaching it to smile the right way, at the right time.

According to the team behind the laughing robot, named Erica, the system could make conversations between humans and AI more natural.

“We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy. So we believe that the way robots can empathize with users is to share their laughter with them,” said Dr. Koji Inoue, Kyoto University, lead author of the study.

Dr. Inoue and colleagues set out to teach their AI system the art of talking with laughter. They collected training data from more than 80 conversations between college students and the robot, which were actually initially piloted by four female actors.

Then in each conversation, alone laughter, social laughter (without humor, such as polite or embarrassed laughter) and loud laughter will be captioned. This data is then used to train an AI system to decide whether to smile or not and choose the appropriate smile pattern.

Imitating a small polite laugh can be awkward, but participating in a good laugh shows empathy. Based on the audio files, the system learned the basic characteristics of social smiles, which tend to be softer, and genuine smiles, with the aim of performing them in the right situations.

“Our biggest challenge in this project was to identify instances where laughter is actually shared, which isn’t easy because as you can see, most laughter isn’t actually shared. We had to be careful to categorize exactly which laughs we could use to analyze, but we cannot assume that any laughter should be reciprocated,” said Dr Inoue.

The team tested Erica’s “funny sense” by creating four short dialogues for her to share with one person, with a new laugh-sharing system being added to the existing chat software. The conversations were then distributed to 130 volunteers, who would rate the system on human-like empathy, spontaneity, and understanding.

The team believes that laughter can help create robots with distinctive characteristics. “We think they can express personality through conversational behaviors, such as laughter, eye contact, gestures and speaking style,” said Dr. Inoue, adding that it can take a long time. more than 20 years ago when we could have a chat with a robot like with a friend.

One of the things to keep in mind is that a robot or a system will never be able to understand you, said Professor Sandra Wachter, of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. It doesn’t know you, doesn’t understand you, and doesn’t understand the meaning of laughter. “They’re not sentient, but they can be very good at making you believe they’re aware of what’s going on,” the professor said.