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Robot Receptionist with an Attitude 117

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the bringing-you-more-hecklers dept.
techno-vampire writes "Carnegie Mellon University is experimenting with a robot receptionist with a personality. The article on NPR tells about the receptionist, named Tank. Tank lives in a computer, with a Frankenstein-like face showing on the monitor. He responds to typed-in questions, including personal ones, with a rather curious personality courtesy of the Drama Department. Among other things, he doesn't seem to like his boss, Dr. Reid Simmons, very much. If asked, Tank will tell you he's also worked at NASA, and failed as a satellite robot. A job at the CIA was also a bust. Dr. Simmons explains that they're trying to make it easier for people to interact with robots, and upgrades are planned."
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Robot Receptionist with an Attitude More

Robot Receptionist with an Attitude

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  • In the near future... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Red Samurai ( 893134 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @07:36AM (#14351193)
    We'll all have robots pissing in our coffee...
    • Last place I worked, the coffee already looked and tasted like used machine oil, so I don't think too many people would notice the difference.
      • The coffee tastes like machine oil? Like... maybe someone just put a drop in, say, for the flavor?

        For the love of everything you hold dear, GET OUT OF THERE! Retreat to a same distance and open fire on the building until it is SLAG. Don't let ANYTHING get out. We'll have to pray they haven't turned the furnace into a Langstrom field generator already...
    • Coffee maker pisses on you!

  • Great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jacobcaz ( 91509 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @07:38AM (#14351201) Homepage
    Our receptionist is already surly and a bit gruff, we can replace her with "Tank" and dramatically increase our gruffness-to-customer ratio! We'll also be able to irritate our customers 24x7 instead of the normal 8x5 we currently get out of our receptionist!
    • Imagine the appointment reminder cards it would send... or how it would react if someone had to cancel their appointment...
  • ... or else they'll commit suicide.

  • Humanity: Obsolete (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Yirimyah ( 884895 )
    Maybe they'll invent a psychotic computer. --Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

  • now with... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PoPRawkZ ( 694140 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @07:47AM (#14351219) Homepage
    Now with genuine people personality! I'm so depressed.

  • Not that different from previous roboceptionist (Score:5, Informative)

    by Agelmar ( 205181 ) * on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @07:48AM (#14351224)
    This is really not that new. Before the current roboceptionist, we had Valerie. I really can't tell the difference between the two - when they first installed Tank, I thought it was a Halloween joke. (He looks somewhat like Frankenstein on the monitor). There is a different face and a different voice, but it seems the same. If you ask "Will it rain tomorrow" he will either not understand your question, or give you the current weather. Trying to find out tomorrow's weather is still rather difficult. Yes, it is an interesting experiment, and yes, it can give directions (rather clearly) to various locations on campus, but it's not at the point where secretaries need to worry about losing their jobs (yet).
    • I went to school at The Art Instititute of Pittsburgh (just a short bus ride away) and had done a few internship projects at CMU. I'd seen Valerie, and while I understand that this is about the advancement of robotics, AI and such, there was another fundamental flaw with it. (Please keep in mind, I'm not knocking it, this is just one gripe):

      The animations from the head could have used a serious visit from someone skilled in 3D animation. If we're talking about creating an experience like that of dealing wit
    • Yeah, I checked Tank out before leaving for winter break, and there didn't seem to be anything different between Valerie. However, they must have fixed one bug in it... When I visited for my admissions interview, I got there a couple hours early, so I was wondering around and found Val. I typed, "hello, my name is ____" (long polish name), and Val started to respond by saying "Hello, ..." then came a screeching "beep"! Val crashed trying to say my last name. Next the X session that it was running on came

  • Starship Titanic, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Hosiah ( 849792 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @07:49AM (#14351229)
    Flash to the adventure game of a few year's back, "Starship Titanic"? Based on Douglas Adams' work and the game had voices from members of the Monty Python troop portraying various robots and creatures. I never solved all the way through it without the cheat book, but the game environment finds one talking to the bots just to see what outrageous thing they'll say next. Just don't put this kind of thing in any kind of mission-critical function...
    • Just don't put this kind of thing in any kind of mission-critical function... No kidding. This great "productivity saver" is going to cost a fortune before it saves a dime. Everyone in the office will be neglecting their work to queue up to play with the secretary. I've worked at offices like that, but she was a flirty, hot 19 -year old instead of a box with a Frankenstein face. At least Tank won't need maternity leave.
  • Carnegie Mellon University is experimenting with a robot receptionist with a personality. The article on NPR tells about the receptionist, named Tank. Tank lives in a computer, with a Frankenstein-like face showing on the monitor.

    the real question is, can it find Sarah Connor?

  • Hmm.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by killeena ( 794394 )
    Combine this robot and the female android [slashdot.org], and it could even be programmed to be the CEOs mistress!
    • I dunno about a mistress named Tank. And a keyboard, how quaint. But maybe if you combined it with a cluster of The Neediest Dolls In The World [slashdot.org], you might have something.

    • WHY THE HELL (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Every time there's a slashdot article on robots, we can't get 50 posts into it without someone talking about fucking a female robot!?!?
      • That's a question which answers itself, really.

      • Re:WHY THE HELL (Score:4, Informative)

        by Skye16 ( 685048 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @08:58AM (#14351448)
        I'd do it. Think of the stories you could tell later in life!

        Everyone bones a fat girl at least once. Why? Most of it is because they're having a bit of a dry run and they're getting desperate, but a lot of it is for the stories they tell their buddies afterwards. "My hand slid between her rolls, and I was all 'fuckin' 'ell, give me that back!, but she didn't, and it just kept going in further and further until I was elbow deep, standing on her stomach and yanking, hoping against hope that I wouldn't have to gnaw my arm off at the shoulder-bicep region before her flab consumed my very soul", followed up with "So, she starts going crazy, screaming '01111001 01100101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110010 01100100 01100101 01110010 00101100 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110010 01100100 01100101 01110010 00100001 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101001 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01110101 01110011 01100010 00100000 01110000 01101111 01110010 01110100 00100001', but at this point, her sata cable had fallen off her cd drive and was just flapping around everywhere and really freaked me the fuck out, so I stopped, gathered my things, and ran for it.".

        I never said they'd be good stories, exactly. But still worth noting!
      • Hey man, didn't say it was me, it was the CEO. Besides, you know you'd hit it. ;-)
    • This guy [activehome.co.uk] already has the right attitude. I would be happy to buy one for the White House, in fact.

      -Eric

  • does it fart too ?

  • Wakamaru (Score:5, Informative)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @08:00AM (#14351262)
    http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n ews/2005/12/26/wrobot26.xml [telegraph.co.uk]

    Wakamaru is a bit friendlier than tank and acts as a security guard.

  • Do we really need one? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Antony-Kyre ( 807195 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @08:09AM (#14351273)
    Yeah, great idea. Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots. Replace the menial jobs that don't matter with robots, i.e. McJobs.
    • Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots

      You mean it could get worse? Already when I am forced to deal with SBC, the person on the other end

      1) Can't understand half of what I tell them
      2) The half they do understand they completely fail to put in context
      3) I have a hard time understanding them
      4) They assume whatever I'm doing is wrong
      5) 9 times out of 10, whatever they tell me to do is wrong

      Personally? Yeah, I'm more than willing to give the ro
      • Yeah, I'm more than willing to give the robots a chance.

        Yeah, I agree. Except, can't they make them fucking neutral? I don't want a robot to gossip with me, or share both ridiculous and flat-out untrue complaints.

        But as to your list of SBC issues, it sounds like a slight amount of artificial intelligence would vastly outdo the crap job that humans are doing there.

    • The opposite! Please replace CS desks urgently (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @09:36AM (#14351626)
      >> Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots.

      Your experience of Customer Service departments clearly does not match my own. The following memory will live with me forever:

      Me: Here, I'll demonstrate your service fault to you. Please telnet to your site on port 80 first.

      Verisign Customer Service: What is telnet?

      This kind of CS problem is actually not very surprising. The front desk Customer Service staff for any large business have to be the cheapest of the cheap because manpower doesn't scale and is a collosal business expense. It follows that the people are often rather poorly skilled, perhaps given only a few days training in which they learn by rote rather than acquire real understanding.

      So bring on the expert system AIs for Customer Service quickly please!! This is the ideal application.
      • There is an article in the Jan 05 issue of Fast Company about Fujitsu's customer service business in Europe. No free link available yet.

        Instead of getting paid by call volume, they got companies to pay them based on the size of the customer pool they are supporting. Instead of crappy, quick turn-around based phone service, they work with callers to actually understand and solve the problem, and then they work with the company to eliminate the issue that caused the problem.

        Apparently they are doing pretty we
      • So bring on the expert system AIs for Customer Service quickly please!!

        He said expert systems. He didn't say replace customer service with text-to-speech ELIZAs. Give that guy a rough idea of how HTTP is supposed to work in training (which can be as simple as "client says GET webpage.html, server either says 200 OK and prints the page, or says 404 Not Found and prints an error page"), and when the customer says "telnet to your server", he can easily pull up a description of what Telnet is, an AI-influenced

    • Re:Do we really need one? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 )
      I don't think the idea is to make an economically viable receptionist. Otherwise they'd have suck with Valerie. It's research.

      The idea of a social robot is interesting for several reasons. First is that our behavior and thinking is a lot more determined by those around us than we think. Also, to be successful, you have to make the robot operate "intelligently" in as many real situations as possible, as opposed to a constrained problem like chess or block world. Placing it in a public place like this a

    • Re:Do we really need one? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @09:59AM (#14351739)
      Yeah, great idea. Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots. Replace the menial jobs that don't matter with robots, i.e. McJobs.

      Actually you couldn't be more wrong. Most customer service skills are outsourced to foreign countries as it is. Replacing those jobs wouldn't affect our market that much. (trust me... my old call center with an unnamed major ISP layed everyone off right after I quit and outsourced to India... I do still tech support over the phone, but if I got replaced with a robot it wouldn't bother me that much since most of the people that are in CS or TS phone support hate their jobs anyways and spend most of the day browsing monster.com at work)

      Secondly, a Robot would put up with shit that human would not. Screaming... Cursing... All that stuff that customers do without retorting or walking off the job. Hell it would have an "American accent" and have better english skills than you or I.

      However the trick is to fool the customer into believing the person is an uber happy person willing to give them their proverbial first born which means the thing will have to pass a turing test... ...which means not any time soon.
    • your idea is even more brilliant. Get rid of the only hope some people have of staying afloat and not killing themselves. Get rid of McJobs. Yeah, sure, just cause you don't need them, it means nobody needs them, right? How about start with giving everyone proper education and mandating a certain level of nutrition from mcdonalds and other places that live off the poor. Then when those people can get good jobs, then take the rug away, not while they're standing on it.
      • I didn't mention McDonalds. I mentioned McJobs.

        I really don't believe customer service can ever really be replaced by intelligent machines. I say this based on my feelings that a machine won't become as intelligent as a human anytime soon. I think a well trained human can do a better customer service job than a machine would be able to do.

        Since you mentioned McDonalds, let me use that as an example. Maybe if they can use machines to make the food for customers, so more people can handle orders. Maybe at a g
    • Replace the menial jobs that don't matter with robots

      Hmm, this begs question of what will happen the lower %30 of the bell curve. Oh wait, those are employed by government....the lower %30-%60 then?

      Are they doomed to a life predicted by Star Trek, where their only purpose is wandering around the hallways, and getting killed by aliens on away mission? (Yes, the officers in Star Trek never get killed, its always that enlisted shmuck that's along for the ride).

      What do we do when robots have taken the
  • Does it drink beer?
  • This line of work in Comp Sci is just like a soap opera. The characters change and the fads change, but after years and years of study they have yet to make a machine convincingly human like.

    Largely because it's really hard to fit years of human experience into a few GB of disk space.

    • Yes, but not too long ago, they were trying to fit a lifetime of human experience into a few MB of disk space. Soon we'll be trying to fit months of human experience into TB of disk space! We're making progress! :)

  • Speech synth still lacking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @08:26AM (#14351314) Homepage
    If you RTFA, there's a link "Listen" with audio of the NPR piece. I'm surprised that they're using a speech synth that sounds like it's at least ten years behind the times, as? well? as? sounding? like? every? word? is? a? kvestion?? The Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice engine that MS gives away with SAPI4/Agent is arguably better, and that's 1998 tech from a dead company. (L&H, not MS.)

    A good speech synth would add a lot to Tank's personality. (On the other hand, I have 1980s tech card that would sound awful but very robo-retro.)

  • It's only a matter of time before we'll need to pull out the the Voigt-Kampff machine to tell them apart from us soylent-green folks.
  • You want some more

    You want some more

    (This is the most advanced thing I've seen as a bar mixer so far in the 5th Element, and when I saw this news I just had to chuckle thinking about this clumsy stupid little robot serving drinks at the airport in the movie).
  • (Thanks to David Spade)

    'And you are...?'
     
  • My 9th grade english teacher asked us to come up with a short question that would allow us to keep robots out of a building yet let humans through. I came up with something about lies, but that wouldn't work and was too vague. It will be more and more difficult to seperate the clankies from the fleshies and in say, 50 years, you won't I'd imagine.
  • Okay I can understand the use of an AI that can understand a question like, 'what will the weather be like tomorrow'. This is a complex question especially if you factor in that if I ask it YOU might know that tomorrow I am going to england/london.

    But who the fuck cares about a computer with a history? I want small talk from my PC? If I want meaningless drivel I talk to the my co-workers thank you very much. I really can't see this as being usefull. A good receptionist gives you the information you want, h

    • Re:Ehm, why? (Score:3, Funny)

      by vertinox ( 846076 )
      But who the fuck cares about a computer with a history?

      Hello Dave, would you like to see home made videos of my previous owner and his 70 year old wife? Let me show you all his browser history of old love sites he would browse. What are you doing Dave?! Why are you trying to format my hard drive!

  • Not really all that impressive... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Improv ( 2467 ) <pgunn01@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @10:02AM (#14351764) Homepage Journal
    Just like Valerie [dachte.org] (the previous persona they gave to the dalek-like roboceptionist), there's nothing particularly impressive that goes into it - mix the eliza software with a few queries that can produce canned answers and the (admittedly useful) ability to look up weather around the world and find where people's offices are, and you have this thing. The public face is nothing impressive -- anyone who has seen what the Final Fantasy movies will find the graphics on this thing ridiculously primitive -- Valerie's face looked like it was generated on the fly in the age of PentiumII/200, and Tank's face is the same but less attractive. I suppose that's not the point though -- the project is intended to study human/avatar interaction, and a number of people do seem to enjoy playing with the system.
  • After reading the article, all I can think of is Marvin the Paranoid Android, specifically the incarnation from the BBC TV series seen here in the US on PBS from time to time.

  • Oh, Terrific!

    Having been the boss at places before, it is already hard enough because the staff has a natural tendency to hate their supervisors. Now even the computers can hate me, too.

    • Wouldn't it be easier to replace a Boss with this program? Receptionists are expected to Think and Interact Productively.

  • Attitude is everything (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blastard ( 816262 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @11:06AM (#14352132)
    I think the point here is that the computer does not have the Stepford Wife annoyingly pleasant attitude that the usual computer assistants have.

    Back in the early '80s my fellow students and I wrote computer based quizzing software for our classes. We played around with different responses to wrong answers. Contrary to what educational software companies were putting out, our programs would occasionally razz you for a wrong answer. Care to guess which ones the students used more often?

    There is only so much a person can take of a caring and supportive computer before it gets really annoying.

    BTW, I also wrote a rudimentary hash algorithm to weed out obscene names, without having to code those very names into the program. And yes, it could be defeated by inserting 1 or 0 in place of L or I and O.
  • Some friends and I briefly talked about trying to create an online persona with a "soap opera" factor. We'd planned to have a blog with machine-generated entries that included stuff like hookups with various guys. In other words, she'd have more of a sex life than most geeks out there. We also wanted to have her occasionally post to message boards to see how well she could engage the users there. But some professors in my department were concerned about the ethics, so it's temporarily on hold.
  • This is an old project. I've heard before about the virtual personas in computers NASA invents throughout the years.

    Thing is they approach AI upside-down. I.e. instead of creating a system that's good on pattern recognition and logical operations, they instead cobble up together lots of simulation technologies, like speech recognition, vast dictionary and a ton of if..else code.

    I.e. they build AI based on the output of its interface (behaviour, speech, vision) and not based on how intelligence trully works.
    • You don't need a fast Neural network :) Your neural network is only on the order of a few hertz. A linear simulation running 1billion neurons at 1 Gigahertz can simulate a 1 billion neural network running at 1 hertz in real time.
      • Actually no it can't. The number of operations required to simulate a node in a neural network and the GHz of your Pentium have no correlation whatsoever.

        As a start, the CPU can't perform one op per hertz every time, sometime is has to wait for cache, and waiting for data from RAM can take hundreds of idle cycles.

        And even besides that, the code for simulating one node in the network is actually not one basic CPU command, it's a tiny program on its own.
        • I know. That's why I said "simulation running 1 billion neurons at 1 Gigahertz", not "machine operating at 1 Ghz." Assuming that a single Neuron can be simulated in 1 billionth of a second (AKA, 1 Ghz) then a billion neurons can be simulated in 1 second at 1Hz. This doesn't account for the ram required to store the neural output of a billion Neurons, or the actual processor hardware required.

          If a single neuron can be simulated using a more reasonable average of 400 cycles, (if we assume mathmatically mod
  • ... if he keeps failing at jobs like that! I wonder if it was his attitude or 'just being lazy' that got him fired from nasa?

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