Chinese scientists develop robot that can emote while communicating

In an era where human-robot interactions are becoming seamless, a Chinese team has developed an ‘emotional chatting machine’ to add to the seamlessness.

As reported by The Guardian, The emotionally sophisticated robot (ECM) was able to produce factually coherent answers whilst also imbuing its conversation with emotions such as happiness, sadness or disgust.

Minlie uang, a computer scientist at Tsinghua University, Beijing and co-author, said: “We’re still far away from a machine that can fully understand the user’s emotion. This is just the first attempt at this problem,” she told The Guardian.

Huang and colleagues started by creating an “emotion classifying” algorithm that learned to detect emotion from 23,000 posts taken from the Chinese social media site Weibo. The posts had been manually classified by humans as sad, happy and so on.

The emotion classifier was then used to tag millions of social media interactions according to emotional content. This huge dataset served as a training ground for the chatbot to learn both how to answer questions and how to express emotion.

The resulting program could be switched into five possible modes – happy, sad, angry, disgusted, liking – depending on the user’s preference.

The team predicts the software could advance to a level where the chatbot will learn the appropriate emotion for a given moment in time.