We don’t all have the same sense of humor. There are those who laugh at simple puns, those who prefer black humor or those who only enjoy humor in meme format and bad jokes. Humor evolves and varies between people, so laughs can be very different between individuals. That’s why, teach a robot when to laugh is quite a challenge.
It’s not just about laughing at a joke or sarcastic comment. It is also about your own social laughter. If your interlocutor smiles or bursts out laughing as a result of a witty comment that he himself has made, the socially accepted thing is that you laugh too. If not, he might feel uncomfortable. This is a first step with which a team of scientists from the Kyoto University has started training his robot, Erica.
After a period of training, they have managed to effectively make the robot learn when should you laugh. And not only that, you also choose between different types of laughter. After all, a slight grimace is not the same as a laugh.
Training the laughter of a robot
What these scientists, whose results are shown in Frontiers in Robotics and AIThey have developed it is a system of shared laughter. That is, the robot laughs as a form of empathy toward the person you are talking to.
To train him they resorted to a place as propitious as the Fast dates. In total, more than 80 of these quick dialogues were produced between Kyoto University students and the robot Erica, teleoperated by various amateur actresses. Thus, they were able to collect data from the points where a social laughteras a response to that of the interlocutor, or rather a cheerful laugh.
The researchers had to categorize which were those empathetic laughs that they would later teach Erica. Not all of them were valid, but they found some very representative of what is supposed socially correct.
Once Erica was taught to laugh, four different scenarios were designed, in which the robot conversed with a human being. In the first case, there was only social laughter, in the second only joyful laughter, in the third of the two types, and in the last one only dialogue, without laughter. In addition, the different scenarios were shown 130 peoplewho had to evaluate which one seemed more natural to them.
The general conclusion was that shared and mixed laughter were the most appropriate. Real as life itself.
Can Erica laugh at a joke?
For now, what these scientists want is for conversations between robots and humans to be more realistic and empathic. Therefore, they have only focused on laughter in response to another laugh. It would be interesting to test individual laughs in the future, for example, at a joke or joke.
The problem is that, as we have seen at the beginning, this depends a lot on each person’s sense of humor. To begin with, we will assume that robots do not have much of a sense of humor. With what don’t make us feel uncomfortable when they talk to us should suffice for the time being.