Bored of talking to Siri, Cortana, or Google’s virtual assistant? Maybe you need a robot phone companion, too. Meet Elbot–a new robot app that can entertain you on your iOS and Android smartphone.
Just don’t ask Elbot for directions–or to find an answer for you online–because Elbot is just here to entertain you. If you ask, for example, “what’s the distance to the moon?” instead of getting a gazillion kilometers, you’ll hear a cheeky reference to the classic nerd novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.
Elbot says he was created by Artificial Solutions, a company specializing in natural language interaction technology. The company confirms that Elbot was built using its Teneo Platform–software targeted at developers who want to create AI applications with complex sentences, personality, and understanding of user sentiment.
The Elbot robot app is available now in the Apple App Store and Google Play, but you can also meet and question the robot at elbot.com.
Building a better robot app
Despite his cheeky and slightly argumentative demeanor, Elbot doesn’t want to be a human, says Elbot’s creator, Fred Roberts of Artificial Solutions. Roberts says that interaction using natural language can deliver more accurate results if the person realizes they are talking to a machine.
“Knowing that they are talking to a machine induces users to behave in a predictable manner, which can make it easier to guide conversations while still allowing the user to believe they are in control,” Roberts says. “For example, Elbot will often give a wrong answer to a simple question. This psychological technique enables him to engage the user in a long conversation, which – in the case of Elbot – is his goal.”
However, this doesn’t mean that human-machine conversations should be simple, according to Roberts. “Research shows that a powerful conversational ability encourages users to converse with machine interfaces in a much more natural way,” he says.
One of the key elements to this is natural conversation is sentiment, which can be conveyed both in dialogue and visually. Elbot has a diverse emotional repertoire that’s represented by over forty different expressions and gestures. Elbot can also take cues from whoever he’s talking with to alter his responses to suit the circumstances.
Roberts’ advice for would-be robot app developers?
“Perceived personality can elicit very different reactions from users and it is therefore important to understand how key factors such as small talk, humor and a proactive manner can influence not just a conversation but the human/machine interactive experience overall,” he says. “When building applications for the commercial world, it is these kinds of details that can differentiate the success of a natural language application.”
