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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!
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...
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.
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.
I'd do it. Think of the stories you could tell later in life!
Everyone bones a fat girl at least once. Why? Most of it is because they're having a bit of a dry run and they're getting desperate, but a lot of it is for the stories they tell their buddies afterwards. "My hand slid between her rolls, and I was all 'fuckin' 'ell, give me that back!, but she didn't, and it just kept going in further and further until I was elbow deep, standing on her stomach and yanking, hoping against hope that I wouldn't have to gnaw my arm off at the shoulder-bicep region before her flab consumed my very soul", followed up with "So, she starts going crazy, screaming '01111001 01100101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110010 01100100 01100101 01110010 00101100 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110010 01100100 01100101 01110010 00100001 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101001 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01110101 01110011 01100010 00100000 01110000 01101111 01110010 01110100 00100001', but at this point, her sata cable had fallen off her cd drive and was just flapping around everywhere and really freaked me the fuck out, so I stopped, gathered my things, and ran for it.".
I never said they'd be good stories, exactly. But still worth noting!
>> 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
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.