Teaching Robot to Laugh at Right Time

September 16, 2022 By Awanish Kumar

(Image Credit Google)

"Laughter is the best medicine" is an age-old saying, quite well-known to everybody. But who would've imagined that scientists would try to implement it on robots (not that they get sick or anything)? But that's what a team of scientists precisely tried to do, albeit not to improve a robot's health. The team's research is published in Frontiers (publishers of peer-reviewed open-access scientific journals) in Robotic and AI (artificial intelligence), according to The Guardian. They developed an AI system that aimed to recreate the different nuances of humor by laughing at the right time. Consequently, the team developed a laughing robot named Erica.

The laughing robot research

According to the report by The Guardian, scientists behind Erica claim that the system could improve the natural conversation between people and AI systems. Dr. Koji Inoue, the lead author of the research from Japan's Kyoto University, stated, "We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy. So we decided that one way a robot can empathize with users is to share their laughter." Erica

Therefore, Inoue and his colleagues tried to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. The team gathered training data from over 80 speed-dating dialogues between male university students and Erica for their research. Initially, they used four amateur actresses to teleoperate the laughing robot. Furthermore, The Guardian reported that the scientist annotated the dialogue data for solo laughs, social laughs (ones without humor, such as polite or embarrassed laughs), and laughter of joy. Then they used this data to train a machine learning system to decide whether to laugh. In addition, the team also taught the AI system to choose the appropriate type of laugh. Erica

Moreover, the algorithm developed by the scientists learned the basic characteristics of social laughs based on the audio files created by the team. Thus, the AI system aimed to mirror these social laughs in the right situations at the right time.

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According to Inoue, the team's "biggest challenge in this work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter, which isn't easy because, as you know, people don't share most laughter at all." Hence, he said, "we had to carefully categorize which laughs we could use for our analysis and not just assume that any laugh can be responded to." Erica

Furthermore, the scientists tested Erica's sense of humor by creating four short dialogues the laughing robot can share with a person. And for that, they integrated the new shared-laughter algorithm into existing conversation software. Then, the team compared these to scenarios where Erica did not laugh or produced a social laugh every time she detected laughter. After that, the team played the clips to 130 volunteers for rating. They all rated the shared-laughter algorithm the most favorable for empathy, naturalness, human-likeness, and understanding, per The Guardian's report. According to laughing robot researchers, laughter could help create robots with their own distinct characters. However, Inoue noted that it would take over 20 years before people can have a "casual chat with a robot like with a friend."

By Awanish Kumar

I keep abreast of the latest technological developments to bring you unfiltered information about gadgets.

Teaching Robot to Laugh at Right Time

The laughing robot research

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