From The Guardian, September 15:
Scientists try to teach robot to laugh at the right timeResearch team hopes system could improve natural conversations between humans and AI systems
Laughter comes in many forms, from a polite chuckle to a contagious howl of mirth. Scientists are now developing an AI system that aims to recreate these nuances of humour by laughing in the right way at the right time.
The team behind the laughing robot, which is called Erica, say that the system could improve natural conversations between people and AI systems.
“We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy,” said Dr Koji Inoue, of Kyoto University, the lead author of the research, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. “So we decided that one way a robot can empathise with users is to share their laughter.”
Inoue and his colleagues have set out to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. They gathered training data from more than 80 speed-dating dialogues between male university students and the robot, who was initially teleoperated by four female amateur actors.
The dialogue data was annotated for solo laughs, social laughs (where humour isn’t involved, such as in polite or embarrassed laughter) and laughter of mirth. This data was then used to train a machine learning system to decide whether to laugh, and to choose the appropriate type.
It might feel socially awkward to mimic a small chuckle, but empathetic to join in with a hearty laugh. Based on the audio files, the algorithm learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued, and mirthful laughs, with the aim of mirroring these in appropriate situations.
“Our biggest challenge in this work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter, which isn’t easy because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all,” said Inoue. “We had to carefully categorise exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and not just assume that any laugh can be responded to.”....
....MUCH MORE
I can't help but think of Professor Stephen Hawking's guest appearances on The Big Bang Theory:
And yes, I know that Stephen Hawking was not a robot. But I like his voice. And apparently, so did he:
....Professor Hawking used the Speech Plus CallText 5010 until his death in 2018, despite the fact that he had been offered “upgrades”. In fact, when he needed a new synthesizer — two decades after Speech Plus had gone out of business — his team went to great lengths to restore ‘Perfect Paul’.“I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it,” Hawking said in 2006....—Rachel Handley, Beyond Words, 15 July 2021
