Monday, December 08, 2008

Voight-Kampff moot - Deckart out of work - Future androids will be empatic

IO9 always comes up with the most interesting stuff! If you remember your Blade Runner lore, The robotic Replicants in Blade Runner were indistinguishable from humans except for their lack of empathy. Now researchers are creating virtual human analogs that can detect human emotions through non-verbal cues and develop appropriate responses. This could lead to artificial life forms who are not only intelligent, but empathic as well.

Why you might ask? It is becoming more and more common to interact with machines in everyday life. From leaving messages, to being connected to the proper agent or becoming more common to complete a sale or service call start to finish with a machine.

However researchers at Paris' Institute of Technology have found that people frequently lose interest in some systems because they don’t seem sufficiently human in their responses. To create programs that keep humans engaged, teams at the Paris Institute of Technology are developing a virtual human that will recognize and respond to human emotions. They are training them to detect emotional expressions via webcam, and studying how flesh and blood humans react to the virtual's responses. They are hoping that this will improve the way that humans interact with them.

<- IO9 article ->

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