A research group led by Assistant Professor Kouji Inoue, Program-Specific Researcher Divesh Lala, and Professor Tatsuya Kawahara at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Informatics has developed a conversational robot that can laugh back when people laugh.
According to Kyoto University, the research group extracted the points where synchronous laughter occurred and the points where only one person laughed from 82 conversation data of men and women who met for the first time, and the points where synchronous laughter occurred were classified as loud laughter or social laughter. Based on the conversation partner's voice, we built three models that judge (3) whether the other person laughs, (XNUMX) whether you laugh, and (XNUMX) how you laugh, and added them to the functions of the autonomous android.
Furthermore, when we created conversational voices with androids and had more than 130 third parties listen to them through crowdsourcing, we found that the effectiveness of the new function and that the robot's sympathy and human-likeness were demonstrated by appropriately performing synchronized laughter. confirmed to improve.
Robots equipped with conversational AI can answer questions appropriately, but it is difficult for them to sympathize with the person they are talking to, and they have not been able to coexist with humans as a natural conversation partner.
In a super-aging society like Japan, the realization of conversational robots that can coexist with humans is expected.In the future, the research group plans to apply this synchronized laughter to various conversation scenes and verify its effects.
Paper information:[Frontiers in Robotics and AI] Can a robot laugh with you?: Shared laughter generation for empathetic spoken dialogue
