Scientists Have Created a Robot That Can Laugh With You

Humor has a long history. What makes something humorous have long baffled philosophers and Scientists since at least the time of enquiring minds like Plato. The Greeks believed the feeling superior was the source of humor. Sigmund Freud a German psychologist thought humor was meant to let off energy. And comedians around the world are full of it. Scientists at Kyoto University have developed a shared laughter AI system that reacts properly to human laughter.

By creating an AI that gets its signals from shared laughing system a researchers at Kyoto University in Japan is trying to do that. The researchers describe their novel technique for creating a funny bone for Japanese robot ‘Erica’. In the model a human initially laughs and AI system responds with laughter as an empathetic response. There were three sub systems- one to detect laughter, a second to decide whether to laugh and third to choose the appropriate laugher. The training data was gathered by annotating more than 80 dialogues.

The team eventually tested Erica’s new sense of humor by creating four short two to three minute dialogues between a person and Erica with her new shared laughter system. The researchers crowd sourced more than 130 people in total to listen to each scenario within the three different conditions.

There are still planet of other laughing styles to model and train Erica before she is ready to hit the standup circuit. There are many other laughing functions and types which need to be considered and this is not an easy task. And laughter is just one aspect of having a natural human like conversation with a robot. An interesting fact is after 10 to 20 years before having a casual chat with a robot we would do it with a friend.