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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.
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...
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
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
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.
This is slashdot. Fark is that way ---->
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.
Yes, but not too long ago, they were trying to fit a lifetime of human experience into a few MB of disk space. Soon we'll be trying to fit months of human experience into TB of disk space! We're making progress! :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
(Thanks to David Spade)
'And you are...?'
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
What did happen to Valerie?
Perhaps she's in chroot() jail.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>> 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 don't know if Parry would be happy working there.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
But who the fuck cares about a computer with a history?
Hello Dave, would you like to see home made videos of my previous owner and his 70 year old wife? Let me show you all his browser history of old love sites he would browse. What are you doing Dave?! Why are you trying to format my hard drive!
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Which would you prefer: 1) A flower for your sweetheart, 2) A puppy, or 3) A Large properly formatted data file?
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
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.
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.
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.