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Robot Receptionist with an Attitude
techno-vampire writes "Carnegie Mellon University is experimenting with a robot receptionist with a personality. The article on NPR tells about the receptionist, named Tank. Tank lives in a computer, with a Frankenstein-like face showing on the monitor. He responds to typed-in questions, including personal ones, with a rather curious personality courtesy of the Drama Department. Among other things, he doesn't seem to like his boss, Dr. Reid Simmons, very much. If asked, Tank will tell you he's also worked at NASA, and failed as a satellite robot. A job at the CIA was also a bust. Dr. Simmons explains that they're trying to make it easier for people to interact with robots, and upgrades are planned."
We'll all have robots pissing in our coffee...
Our receptionist is already surly and a bit gruff, we can replace her with "Tank" and dramatically increase our gruffness-to-customer ratio! We'll also be able to irritate our customers 24x7 instead of the normal 8x5 we currently get out of our receptionist!
... or else they'll commit suicide.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
Maybe they'll invent a psychotic computer. --Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Aha, so "lies all the time" == "more humanlike" ?
Now with genuine people personality! I'm so depressed.
peace,
-Grokent
This is really not that new. Before the current roboceptionist, we had Valerie. I really can't tell the difference between the two - when they first installed Tank, I thought it was a Halloween joke. (He looks somewhat like Frankenstein on the monitor). There is a different face and a different voice, but it seems the same. If you ask "Will it rain tomorrow" he will either not understand your question, or give you the current weather. Trying to find out tomorrow's weather is still rather difficult. Yes, it is an interesting experiment, and yes, it can give directions (rather clearly) to various locations on campus, but it's not at the point where secretaries need to worry about losing their jobs (yet).
Flash to the adventure game of a few year's back, "Starship Titanic"? Based on Douglas Adams' work and the game had voices from members of the Monty Python troop portraying various robots and creatures. I never solved all the way through it without the cheat book, but the game environment finds one talking to the bots just to see what outrageous thing they'll say next. Just don't put this kind of thing in any kind of mission-critical function...
Carnegie Mellon University is experimenting with a robot receptionist with a personality. The article on NPR tells about the receptionist, named Tank. Tank lives in a computer, with a Frankenstein-like face showing on the monitor.
the real question is, can it find Sarah Connor?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Combine this robot and the female android, and it could even be programmed to be the CEOs mistress!
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
does it fart too ?
Every time there's a slashdot article on robots, we can't get 50 posts into it without someone talking about fucking a female robot!?!?
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n ews/2005/12/26/wrobot26.xml
Wakamaru is a bit friendlier than tank and acts as a security guard.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
You must be new here.
What did happen to Valerie? Has the FBRI been alerted? Perhaps her picture could be put on oil cans or something, 'cause it'd be a shame if she was found in some dumpster.
Yeah, great idea. Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots. Replace the menial jobs that don't matter with robots, i.e. McJobs.
Zordon: "Alpha 5, Rita Repulsa has escaped."
Alpha 5: "Aie, aie, aie, aie, aie."
Zordon: "Find me five robots with attitude."
Does it drink beer?
Kill all humans!
Largely because it's really hard to fit years of human experience into a few GB of disk space.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
A good speech synth would add a lot to Tank's personality. (On the other hand, I have 1980s tech card that would sound awful but very robo-retro.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
...in 1983. His name was/is Artificial Insanity. He has several personality disorders (the most glaring being bipolar), doesn't pay attention well, but does answer questions in context.
A friend had a later version loaded on his computer, and his friend got so annoyed with Art he broke the keyboard!
He was first created on, believe it or not, a Timex/Sinclair computer with no disks and a 16k (not meg, KILO) memory. He usually passes the Turing test quite well.
Its purpose was to demonstrate that apparent sentience isn't necessarily real. You can simulate anything on a computer, but a simulation isn't reality. I fear my grandchildren may live in a world with a PETA-like organization for "machine rights."
Frank Herbert had teh right idea with Dune, "sentient" machines in charge of humans actually controlled by other humans, resulting in a jihad against thinking machines and outlawing them.
Art was later ported to the Apple II, then to DOS. It hasn't been upgraded, but is available for download at mcgrew.info.
One of these days I may get around to porting it to javascript.
(mrc="bewitch")
It's only a matter of time before we'll need to pull out the the Voigt-Kampff machine to tell them apart from us soylent-green folks.
You want some more
You want some more
(This is the most advanced thing I've seen as a bar mixer so far in the 5th Element, and when I saw this news I just had to chuckle thinking about this clumsy stupid little robot serving drinks at the airport in the movie).
Leopard cub
(Thanks to David Spade)
'And you are...?'
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
My 9th grade english teacher asked us to come up with a short question that would allow us to keep robots out of a building yet let humans through. I came up with something about lies, but that wouldn't work and was too vague. It will be more and more difficult to seperate the clankies from the fleshies and in say, 50 years, you won't I'd imagine.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
with a brain the size of a planet...
>> Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots.
Your experience of Customer Service departments clearly does not match my own. The following memory will live with me forever:
Me: Here, I'll demonstrate your service fault to you. Please telnet to your site on port 80 first.
Verisign Customer Service: What is telnet?
This kind of CS problem is actually not very surprising. The front desk Customer Service staff for any large business have to be the cheapest of the cheap because manpower doesn't scale and is a collosal business expense. It follows that the people are often rather poorly skilled, perhaps given only a few days training in which they learn by rote rather than acquire real understanding.
So bring on the expert system AIs for Customer Service quickly please!! This is the ideal application.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
But who the fuck cares about a computer with a history? I want small talk from my PC? If I want meaningless drivel I talk to the my co-workers thank you very much. I really can't see this as being usefull. A good receptionist gives you the information you want, he/she does NOT show you the photographs of the kids.
I don't get this whole "making computers easier to communicate with" deal either. By the time this tech will be usable all the old people who have a VCR with a blinking timer will be death and kids who grew up with PC's will have taken over. Spend you time on a better google, not on creating another Bob or Clippy or that damn stupid Dog in that made me hate XP with a passion first time I saw it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...by the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
it should greet you with "I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed,"
Just like Valerie (the previous persona they gave to the dalek-like roboceptionist), there's nothing particularly impressive that goes into it - mix the eliza software with a few queries that can produce canned answers and the (admittedly useful) ability to look up weather around the world and find where people's offices are, and you have this thing. The public face is nothing impressive -- anyone who has seen what the Final Fantasy movies will find the graphics on this thing ridiculously primitive -- Valerie's face looked like it was generated on the fly in the age of PentiumII/200, and Tank's face is the same but less attractive. I suppose that's not the point though -- the project is intended to study human/avatar interaction, and a number of people do seem to enjoy playing with the system.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
After reading the article, all I can think of is Marvin the Paranoid Android, specifically the incarnation from the BBC TV series seen here in the US on PBS from time to time.
There is an article in the Jan 05 issue of Fast Company about Fujitsu's customer service business in Europe. No free link available yet.
Instead of getting paid by call volume, they got companies to pay them based on the size of the customer pool they are supporting. Instead of crappy, quick turn-around based phone service, they work with callers to actually understand and solve the problem, and then they work with the company to eliminate the issue that caused the problem.
Apparently they are doing pretty well, and their employee turnover, if memory serves, was 8%, compared to 40% for the industry. So maybe things are going to get better.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Oh, Terrific!
Having been the boss at places before, it is already hard enough because the staff has a natural tendency to hate their supervisors. Now even the computers can hate me, too.
{ - Generic Guy - }
the Philip K. Dick robot. http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/23/philip_k_dick _robot.html
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
The OP wrote:"...with a Frankenstein-like face..."
Nope, Tank's face doesn't look anything like a mad scientist's. Oh! You mean "Frankenstein's MONSTER". Geez. Can we at least get _that_ right?
Coffee maker pisses on you!
I think the point here is that the computer does not have the Stepford Wife annoyingly pleasant attitude that the usual computer assistants have.
Back in the early '80s my fellow students and I wrote computer based quizzing software for our classes. We played around with different responses to wrong answers. Contrary to what educational software companies were putting out, our programs would occasionally razz you for a wrong answer. Care to guess which ones the students used more often?
There is only so much a person can take of a caring and supportive computer before it gets really annoying.
BTW, I also wrote a rudimentary hash algorithm to weed out obscene names, without having to code those very names into the program. And yes, it could be defeated by inserting 1 or 0 in place of L or I and O.
Dam.. What is it about Japan and their habit about being vague about gender. I mean come on.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
So bring on the expert system AIs for Customer Service quickly please!!
He said expert systems. He didn't say replace customer service with text-to-speech ELIZAs. Give that guy a rough idea of how HTTP is supposed to work in training (which can be as simple as "client says GET webpage.html, server either says 200 OK and prints the page, or says 404 Not Found and prints an error page"), and when the customer says "telnet to your server", he can easily pull up a description of what Telnet is, an AI-influenced description of what he would need it for (by tracking the conversation): e.g., he'd need to know what port 80 means, but probably not what local echo means. Once he's connected, the system shows what the web page is supposed to return. If the customer says it's something different, the expert system has a link to the appropriate RFC, which he can check and either refute the customer or file a real problem report.
Most front-line customer service workers would never encounter telnet in their life. So we can't make knowing it a job requirement - but they have to know telnet if they're ever asked. So we give them an AI that they can use to learn stuff on the spot. It's a lot more helpful than making up stories or transferring calls all the time.
Does the robot say "Bite my shiny metal a**!"?
Helping me read my email, get weather reports, stocks quotes, mapping the human genome, curing cancer, etc, etc. Then I remember such memorable quotes from the TERMINATOR such as: Kyle Reese: Listen. And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. Kyle Reese: You still don't get it, do you? He'll find her. That's what he does. That's all he does! You can't stop him. He'll wade through you, reach down her throat, and pull her fucking heart out. [At a gun store] The Terminator: The .45 Long Slide, with laser sighting.
Pawn Shop Clerk: These are brand new; we just got them in. That's a good gun. Just touch the trigger, the beam comes on and you put the red dot where you want the bullet to go. You can't miss. Anything else?
The Terminator: Phased-plasma rifle in the forty watt range.
Pawn Shop Clerk: Hey, just what you see, pal.
[the Terminator is loading a rifle in the shop]
Pawn Shop Clerk: You can't do that.
The Terminator: Wrong.
So who's with me? We need to go take out these companies like iRobot - before their Roombas take over the world. And while we're at it, lets get USR - U.S. Robotics, before they actually start making robots. Cyberdyne Technology needs to go too before they offer us SkyNet. Who's got the C4?
Some friends and I briefly talked about trying to create an online persona with a "soap opera" factor. We'd planned to have a blog with machine-generated entries that included stuff like hookups with various guys. In other words, she'd have more of a sex life than most geeks out there. We also wanted to have her occasionally post to message boards to see how well she could engage the users there. But some professors in my department were concerned about the ethics, so it's temporarily on hold.
This is an old project. I've heard before about the virtual personas in computers NASA invents throughout the years.
Thing is they approach AI upside-down. I.e. instead of creating a system that's good on pattern recognition and logical operations, they instead cobble up together lots of simulation technologies, like speech recognition, vast dictionary and a ton of if..else code.
I.e. they build AI based on the output of its interface (behaviour, speech, vision) and not based on how intelligence trully works.
Back in the old DOS days, the Sound Blaster sound card shipped with a similar gadget, I think it was called Dr. Sound Blaster or something like that. You ask it questions, and it speaks out pseudo-intelligent replies, based purely on few programming tricks of resynthesizing your question.
I wonder what's the progress since those times.
Oh, and you can't build fast neural network in a linear CPU design. You need massively paralel processing, so I suppose as our chips become increasingly parallel and cores multiply in the thousands (well maybe in 20 years?), we'll see smarter AI simulation as time passes.
That's the Turing test. It's best done by asking something out of context. For instance, when talking about music ask: "did the car where you learned to drive have an automatic transmission?". A robot would need to have a very large set of information about human experiences to be able to answer a random question like this. One effort to develop such a system is the Cyc project.
I guess now we are going to need a Psychiatrist for our roboreceptionist. I wonder how Sigmund Freud would think about tank being suspicious of his creator. I think Tank is secretly attracted to his creator.
No wonder hes pissed off hes a male receptionist!
... if he keeps failing at jobs like that! I wonder if it was his attitude or 'just being lazy' that got him fired from nasa?
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