Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe they'll invent a psychotic computer. --Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
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...
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!?!?
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.
>> 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
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.
I went to school at The Art Instititute of Pittsburgh (just a short bus ride away) and had done a few internship projects at CMU. I'd seen Valerie, and while I understand that this is about the advancement of robotics, AI and such, there was another fundamental flaw with it. (Please keep in mind, I'm not knocking it, this is just one gripe):
The animations from the head could have used a serious visit from someone skilled in 3D animation. If we're talking about creating an experience like that of dealing with an actual receptionist, the visuals of the roboceptionist need to look a little more advanced than pre-Lawnmowerman. I reiterate: the idea and execution had many aspects that were very interesting about how it worked, but when trying to create a robot that functions like a person (in limited scope), it would be nice to see equal attention paid to the 'human' side of it as the robotic instead of looking like something from an 80's sci-fi movie.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Actually I think this may be deliberate to avoid Mori's Uncanny Valley. Since we have not yet advanced to the point where you can make the animation and response indistiguishable from a human, most AI researchers seem to have gone back to almost cartoonish interfaces, which people react to much better than an almost, but not quite right, photo realistic representation.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
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