Scientists try to teach robot to laugh at the right time

Laughter can come in many different forms. Scientists are working on an artificial intelligence system that will be able to laugh in the right way.

According to the team behind the laughing robot, the system could improve natural conversations between people and artificial intelligence systems.

The lead author of the research said that they believe that one of the important functions of the artificial intelligence is empathy. One way a robot can empathise with users is to laugh.

A group of people have set out to teach their artificial intelligence system how to laugh. There were more than 80 speed-dating dialogues between male university students and the robot.

The data was annotated for social laughs and solo laughs. The data was used to train a machine learning system to make a decision about laughing or not.

It might feel weird to mimic a small laugh, but it's ok to laugh. The basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued and funnier, were learned from the audio files.

Most laughter is not shared at all, so identifying the actual cases of shared laughter was the biggest challenge. We had to think carefully about which laughs we could use for our analysis.

The team created four short dialogues forErica to share with a person, using the new shared-laughter algorithm to integrate it into existing software. There were scenarios where she didn't laugh at all or emit a social laugh.

The clips were played to 130 volunteers who rated them highly for their human-likeness.

The team believes that laughter can help create robots with their own personality. It could take more than 20 years before it is possible to have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend, according to the researcher.

The Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford has a professor who keeps in mind that a robot will never be able to understand you. It doesn't know you, it doesn't understand you, and it doesn't understand the meaning of laughing.

She said that they might get good at making you believe they comprehend what is happening.