Emotion news

Virtual human Spike has its own beliefs and values. Additionally, it exhibits rude, pessimistic and confrontational behavior. Even a very cheerful person is not able to convince this virtual agent to chill out, relax or assimilate optimistic outlook. Would you like that Spike became your conversational friend?

Researchers from Human Centered Multimedia at the University of Augsburg developed a virtual character which is capable of recognizing and displaying the emotion of a user.

Researchers from Blavatnik School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University led by Professor Yishay Mansour are developing artificial intelligence algorithm in order to equip machines with human emotions. According to this algorithm based on machine learning, the computer programs are taught a sense of “regret” and how to “feel sorry” for their mistakes.

Just wondering why I have never written about Milo, a virtual agent, conversational avatar, chatbot responding to voice, face and gestures. Very cool presentation.

Ford has filed a patent called “Emotive Text-to-Speech System and Method” describing a system that can not only simulate emotion when reading out directions and describing traffic problems, but could also detect the emotion of the operator of the car and interact with them in ways designed to, oh, soothe a little road rage. The avatar is said to “appear to become frustrated” if the driver is a lead-foot, and may say “Your driving is hurting my fuel efficiency.” Or, if a driver is going too fast, the dash-bound assistant could turn blue, ask what’s wrong, and suggest a more direct route to their destination.

Humans may soon be able to develop long-term relationships with virtual humans that are capable of reading and adapting to our emotions, say French researchers.

Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology presented her research this week at a meeting of the ARC Network in Human Communication Science in Sydney.

Pelachaud and colleagues are developing virtual humans, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), that can act autonomously in a virtual environment. As well as speaking, the agents communicate with facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze.

They are working on virtual agent that can be taught to detect, via a webcam, the emotion of a person looking at the screen.