Feels Like a Human

[theblackalchemist]

Feels Like a Human

A team of international researchers is developing a completely different ‘breed’ of virtual humans, which will be capable of reading and adapting to our emotions.

 

Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology (PIT) said that the virtual humans - called Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) - would act autonomously in a virtual environment; would be able to speak, communicate via facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze; and even develop long-term relationships with humans.

 

After creating the first autonomous agents in 1994, the researchers are now aiming to make the agents more expressive and more capable of reading and adapting to the emotions of users.

 

In one project, called Semaine, the scientists are developing four agents with different personalities.

 

“Semaine and projects like it will change the way people interact with technology. They mean that you will be talking to your computer in 20 years time,” said Professor Roddy Cowie who leads the team at UK’s Queen’s University Belfast, one of the affiliated partners in the project.

 

The other partners are Imperial College London, PIT, the University of Paris 8, the University of Twente in Holland, and the Technical University of Munich. Semaine is led by DFKI, the German centre for research on Artificial Intelligence.

 

“A basic feature of human communication is that it is coloured by emotion,” Cowie, from the university’s School of Psychology, said.

 

“When we talk to another person, the words are carried on an undercurrent of signs that show them what attracts us, what bores us and so on. The fact that computers do not currently do this is one of the main reasons why communicating with them is so unlike interacting with a human. It is also one of the reasons we can find them so frustrating,” he added.

 

Pelachaud said that people expect a lot from virtual humans and often lose interest quickly in them because they don’t appear to be very ‘human’.

 

 

Mumbai Mirror - Feels like a human, Tech - TechTalk,Mumbai Mirror