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."

Comments

Starship Titanic, anyone?

[Hosiah]

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...

Do we really need one?

[Antony-Kyre]

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.

Re:Do we really need one?

[vertinox]

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.

Actually you couldn't be more wrong. Most customer service skills are outsourced to foreign countries as it is. Replacing those jobs wouldn't affect our market that much. (trust me... my old call center with an unnamed major ISP layed everyone off right after I quit and outsourced to India... I do still tech support over the phone, but if I got replaced with a robot it wouldn't bother me that much since most of the people that are in CS or TS phone support hate their jobs anyways and spend most of the day browsing monster.com at work)

Secondly, a Robot would put up with shit that human would not. Screaming... Cursing... All that stuff that customers do without retorting or walking off the job. Hell it would have an "American accent" and have better english skills than you or I.

However the trick is to fool the customer into believing the person is an uber happy person willing to give them their proverbial first born which means the thing will have to pass a turing test... ...which means not any time soon.

The opposite! Please replace CS desks urgently

[Morgaine]

>> 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.

Re:telling us fleshies apart from robots

[StalinsNotDead]

Which would you prefer: 1) A flower for your sweetheart, 2) A puppy, or 3) A Large properly formatted data file?