Robots and Virtual Receptionists

Posted: April 14th, 2009 | Author: Alex | Filed under: Artificial Intelligence | No Comments »

In Robots and Avatars as Hosts, Advisors, Companions and Jesters, Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner discuss key capabilities of human interaction and indicate commonalities across a number of current research efforts to add artificial entities, such as robots and avatars to our lives.

One of the discussed systems is MIT’s MDS. It demonstrates an impressive degree of animation in the following clip.

Dan Bohus‘ and Eric Horvitz‘s Virtual Receptionist is not among the projects examined for the aforementioned paper. It looks very interesting though. Here is a TechFest 2009 video of the system.

Social relationship do not last very long here, unless perhaps, if the Virtual Receptionist maintains a memory of the people it has encountered and utilizes the information during subsequent interactions. I also cannot tell, in how far emotions and/or gestures play a part here. There are however several very interesting bits in that demo. The system identifies the number of participants in the current interaction as well as their poses. It carries on conversations and performs administrative tasks. It also appears able to address a person that it identified as not being part of the current conversation.

It is educational to observe the behavior of the system, but it is also very useful to observe how people’s behavior as they interact with the system.

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