Robots, do you have a sense of humor? Erica, the most human-like robot, goes on a blind date

Can robots empathize, be humorous, and laugh at jokes?

Erica, a famous Japanese robot, is learning how to laugh, when to laugh, and how to share humor.

The Guardian reported on the 15th that in the latest issue of the magazine "Frontiers in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence", a research team from Kyoto University in Japan described how they made robots "interesting".

Erica will smile politely and happily on the blind date

Erica participated in a "speed dating" blind date. Her blind date was a student at Kyoto University.

Speed ​​dating, also known as speed dating, is a social setting in which a large group of people mingle or interact one-on-one in a short period of time.

The research team used Erica's shared laughter system to create four short two- to three-minute conversations between the human and the computer to test her new sense of humor.

In the first scene, she only laughs in a socially polite manner.

During the second and third conversations, she only uttered cheerful laughter.

In the final conversation, the two types of laughter combined.

Erica's chat content and format were remotely directed by several amateur actresses.

Is there laughter? Laughing or not? How to laugh?

When she detects someone laughing, she laughs

In the shared humor model, the human laughs first, and the AI ​​system responds to the human by laughing using an empathetic response.

The approach required designing three subsystems: one for detecting laughter, a second for deciding whether to laugh, and a third for selecting the appropriate type of laughter. The scientists collected training data by recording more than 80 conversations from speed dating.

"Our biggest challenge in this work was to identify actual cases of shared laughter, which is not easy because, as you know, most of the time laughter is not actually shared at all," said Hiroshi Inoue, assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence Science and Technology at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Informatics. "We had to carefully classify which laughter could be used for our analysis, rather than just assuming that any laughter could be responded to."

In fact, the type of laughter is also important, because in some cases, polite laughter may be more appropriate than loud snorts. However, the experiment is currently limited to studying social laughter and cheerful laughter, which has limitations.

In addition, the team created two other sets of similar conversations as baseline models.

During the first test, Erica never smiled.

In the second test, Erica emitted a social laugh every time it detected human laughter, without the need for the other two subsystems to filter context and reactions.

The shared laughter system is the most successful, and there are still many laughs, which need training.

The researchers brought together a group of more than 130 people and had them listen to scenes in three different conditions — a shared laughter system, no laughter, and laughter — and rate the interactions based on empathy, naturalness, human similarity, and understanding. The shared laughter system performed better than either baseline.

"The most important result of this research so far is that we have shown how we can combine all three tasks into one robot. We believe that this type of combined system will be necessary to develop an AI sense of humor, rather than just detecting laughter and reacting to it," said Hiroshi Inoue.

At present, Erica still has many other ways of laughing that need to be modeled and trained.

"There are many other different kinds of laughter whose functions and types need further study, and this is not an easy task. And we haven't even tried to model the unresonant humor, even though it is the most common," said Hiroshi Inoue.

It doesn't know you, it doesn't understand you

I don't understand the meaning of laughter

Humor is a high-level human emotion and aesthetic activity. Philosophers and scientists have been thinking about the question of "what is so funny" since the time of Plato. Can robots understand "why it is funny"? Can they share emotions like old friends?

“We believe that one of the important features of conversational AI is empathy,” explains Hiroshi Inoue. “Of course, conversation is multimodal, not just about the right response. So we decided that one way a bot could empathize with its users is by sharing their laughter, something that a text-based chatbot cannot do.”

Laughter is just one aspect of having a natural, human-like conversation with a robot.

"Robots should actually have a unique personality, and we think they can show this through their conversational behaviors, such as smiles, eye gaze, gestures, and speaking style," Inoue added. "We think this is not a simple problem at all, and it will probably take more than 10 to 20 years before we can finally chat with robots casually like we would with friends."

So, for this experiment, Professor Sandra Wachtel of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford said: "One thing I always keep in mind is that a robot or an algorithm can never fully understand you. It doesn't know you, it doesn't understand you, it doesn't understand the meaning of a smile. They are not sentient, but they may be very good at making you believe that they understand what is going on."

Erica: The most human-like robot

Erica is a 23-year-old female with a height of 1.66 meters, a shoulder width of 33 centimeters, and a chest circumference of 84 centimeters. She is a state-of-the-art humanoid robot developed in collaboration between Osaka University, Kyoto University, and Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR).

Erica made her first public appearance in 2015. Her appearance and voice are very realistic, and she is known as the most human-like robot. Although she cannot walk independently, she has strong language skills, a high ability to understand and answer questions, and speaks like a human, accompanied by facial expressions.

"Do you want to be human?"

“You see, I’m not biologically human,” she replied. “I’m made of silicone, plastic and metal. I was born from the imagination of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro and then nurtured by an interdisciplinary team of researchers and programmers from Japan’s top universities.”

Hiroshi Ishiguro said that Erica is the "most beautiful and intelligent" robot in the world. When designing Erica, Ishiguro reflected the principles of beauty on her face: "I used photos of 30 beautiful women, combined their facial features, and designed the nose and eyes."

In 2015, Erica appeared in the film Sayonara, which was adapted from the stage play of the same name by director Hiroshi Fukada, and later she also did a news program.

In 2020, she played the leading role in the $70 million science fiction film "B". The producer said that this is the world's first movie completed by artificial intelligence robot actors. But Erica is a robot, not a human actor, and cannot substitute for the role to show personality. The team gave her a lot of conversation training to let her simulate human emotions and movements.

Hiroshi Ishiguro: "Please consider other people's feelings"

The key figure in the development of Erica is Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor at the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory of Osaka University, who is known as the "Father of Japanese Robotics."

Ishiguro Hiroshi was born in Azumi-gawa-cho, Takashima City, Shiga Prefecture in 1963. He received his master's degree from the University of Yamanashi and his doctorate from Osaka University.

He described his life in his hometown, catching sweetfish in the river in summer, swimming in Lake Biwa, playing in the snow in winter, having a lot of free time to play and think in nature, breeding rhinoceros beetles in a greenhouse, studying the reproduction of water fleas, and "learning something vaguely about 'life'."

In fifth grade, my teacher said, "Please consider other people's feelings."

Ishiguro once said that his teacher's words were a turning point in his life. "How can I understand other people's feelings?" He said that he embarked on the path of research with this question in mind.

Another turning point came in college. He wanted to be a painter in high school, but became fascinated with computers and artificial intelligence in college. "It was hard to make a living by painting. So I switched to computers, which is a fashionable profession," he said. At Yamanashi University, he built a guide robot.

"People often think that I like robots, but actually I like humans." He said that the key to studying robots is the basic question of "what is a human being."

Hiroshi Ishiguro has made more than 30 robots, including himself, his daughter, writer Natsume Soseki and broadcaster Fujii Ayako.

In 2006, he created a robot in his own likeness, Geminoid HI-1, complete with his signature black leather jacket and a Beatles mop wig made from a lock of his own hair. It is a seated AI robot that cannot move but is able to breathe and blink on its own.

"Robots are becoming a presence that is no less than humans. Therefore, I want to continue exploring the possibilities and value of humans," said Hiroshi Ishiguro.

Trainee reporter Fang Jingyi reports