Chatbot that displays emotional icons.
February 10, 2010 2:36 PM
Is there a chatbot that displays emotion as well as a response?
I am looking for a chatbot that with, along with a text response, displays a basic emotion related to its response.
For instance, insulting it would cause it to display an emotion of angry.
Alternatively, if there is a chatbot designing program that could be used to easily program that feature in, that would work too.
I am looking for a chatbot that with, along with a text response, displays a basic emotion related to its response.
For instance, insulting it would cause it to display an emotion of angry.
Alternatively, if there is a chatbot designing program that could be used to easily program that feature in, that would work too.
insulting it would cause it to display an emotion of angry
What you are asking for is strong AI, and there are no chatbots out there with this level of sophistication today. What you are asking for is essentially the holy grail of artificial intelligence research, something that many very intelligent people have been working on for decades, but yet has not been solved. Some chatbots might appear like they "understand" what you are talking about, at least for a while, but what is going on under the hood is very much unlike what is going on when you talk to another person, and there are definitely no emotions involved.
The best chatbot I have seen personally is Cleverbot. However, it did not seem particularly phased or angry by my insults.
Me: You suck
CB: You wish.
Me: I think you are a big dumb robot!
CB: I think that, too.
Me: Do you have emotions?
CB: Yes. Do you?
posted by sophist at 2:54 PM on February 10, 2010
What you are asking for is strong AI, and there are no chatbots out there with this level of sophistication today. What you are asking for is essentially the holy grail of artificial intelligence research, something that many very intelligent people have been working on for decades, but yet has not been solved. Some chatbots might appear like they "understand" what you are talking about, at least for a while, but what is going on under the hood is very much unlike what is going on when you talk to another person, and there are definitely no emotions involved.
The best chatbot I have seen personally is Cleverbot. However, it did not seem particularly phased or angry by my insults.
Me: You suck
CB: You wish.
Me: I think you are a big dumb robot!
CB: I think that, too.
Me: Do you have emotions?
CB: Yes. Do you?
posted by sophist at 2:54 PM on February 10, 2010
I just taught a unit on chatbots in a cognitive science class last month, and had my students visit a number of bots to compare results. Cleverbot did well in their trials and ALICE did, too. Of course, neither of those (at least the web versions) is really modeling affect at all - keywords and syntax elicit stock responses - but they at least mimic it better than most other widely available ones. None of the chatbots we got to via the web could really sustain the semblance of conversation for more than ten lines or so at a time.
What it really sounds like you're wondering about is affective responses to discourse as a type of background processing. That is, are there chatbots that can recognize my mention of something as, say, a threat or insult or compliment to it, recognize that some affective responses are *supposed* to result and use that in determining an appropriate response. More subtly, could it pick up on lots of conversational contours and realize I'm generally upset with it, even if there's no single phrase that comes across as a burst of anger. No chatbot out there right now is going to come remotely close to even the more modest proposal here. Most of the ones I have visited are lucky if they can track one pronoun across two sentences. One can imagine a chatbot that was tailored to this, maybe by hunting for affect-suggesting keywords and keeping a running tally of some sort in memory. I have no doubt that there are labs and graduate students in various places striving to do this, but you won't find it for free on the web right now.
posted by el_lupino at 5:13 PM on February 10, 2010
What it really sounds like you're wondering about is affective responses to discourse as a type of background processing. That is, are there chatbots that can recognize my mention of something as, say, a threat or insult or compliment to it, recognize that some affective responses are *supposed* to result and use that in determining an appropriate response. More subtly, could it pick up on lots of conversational contours and realize I'm generally upset with it, even if there's no single phrase that comes across as a burst of anger. No chatbot out there right now is going to come remotely close to even the more modest proposal here. Most of the ones I have visited are lucky if they can track one pronoun across two sentences. One can imagine a chatbot that was tailored to this, maybe by hunting for affect-suggesting keywords and keeping a running tally of some sort in memory. I have no doubt that there are labs and graduate students in various places striving to do this, but you won't find it for free on the web right now.
posted by el_lupino at 5:13 PM on February 10, 2010
Parry was an early chatbot; in some ways, he was Eliza's counterpart. Eliza was supposed to emulate a psychotherapist, while Parry was trying to emulate a paranoid schizophrenic. At ARPANET in 1972, they were hooked into each other and had a "conversation".
posted by jenkinsEar at 8:36 PM on February 10, 2010
posted by jenkinsEar at 8:36 PM on February 10, 2010
Cleverbot is very smart indeed. Its creator Rollo Carpenter gave me a demo in Brighton, UK, last September during the Loebner Prize Contest.
You might want to ask your question on this new forum which is currently running in beta:
http://www.chatbots.org/robitron
Many chatbot specialist over there! (including Hugh Loebner, Richard Wallace (creator of ALICE and inventor of AIML) and David Levy (last years winner of the Loebner Prize).
You'll first need to register:
http://www.chatbots.org/register
(which is free).
posted by erwinvanlun at 3:55 AM on February 12, 2010
You might want to ask your question on this new forum which is currently running in beta:
http://www.chatbots.org/robitron
Many chatbot specialist over there! (including Hugh Loebner, Richard Wallace (creator of ALICE and inventor of AIML) and David Levy (last years winner of the Loebner Prize).
You'll first need to register:
http://www.chatbots.org/register
(which is free).
posted by erwinvanlun at 3:55 AM on February 12, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by pocams at 2:52 PM on February 10, 2010