The Funny Maps | The First Thing I Look for in a Robot is a Sense of Humor
Part 1 of “The Funny Maps” series
How many people truly believe Alexa is (or can be) funny? Amazon learned a hard lesson when they had to remove the “Alexa, Laugh” skill because it was giving people the heebie jeebies — can technology successfully incorporate humor at all?
Many have tried to be funny
The fact is that humor and playfulness exist in many of our digital tools and platforms already — think about the Mario Kart and Where’s Waldo interfaces from Google Maps, or the Arnold Schwarzenegger voice option on Waze. There are even weather apps which offer a combination dry/coarse assessment of the forecast for your amusement.
Humor is found in robotics too, both intentional (Shitty Robots) and unintentional like when multi-million-dollar DARPA robots fall over. You can also program robots to fart .. cause that’s funny.
But is there a point?
There’s scant research that supports deliberately placing humor and personality into our technologies — apart from getting us to do things more effectively. One of the most-cited works was a 1999 study by Morkes et al. which debunked the notion that humor in computer interfaces was a distraction. Furthering this, a 2011 experiment showed that a digital agent — when perceived by users to be funny — was more successful at persuading and influencing users to take advice than the neutral agent (Khooshabeh).
Humor can also be useful in error recovery — to help ease frustrations and to keep people engaged with the system. In robotics, Wendt and Berg conducted an experiment which had participants rate their interactions with an unfunny robot, pictured below-left, and a funny robot, pictured below-right. The funny robot was dressed as a butler and performed slapstick-y physical humor as it completed human-directed tasks. The robo-butler was rated as more likeable than its counterpart, even though it would take longer to execute its command (because it was tripping on a rug, also pictured below-right) — leading the authors to suppose that people would be more forgiving of an error or misunderstanding on the robot’s side.
Alexa Mouths Off
So we’ve tested humor in task performance but what about the other positive effects of humor (social inclusion, stress-reduction, creativity) that have not been explored in much depth in HCI and experience design? And back to Alexa: can humor subvert the paradigm of the subservient digital agent? A recent article in Quartz explored how Alexa (and her friends Siri and Cortana) respond to sexual harassment. “Alexa, you’re a slut.” “Well, thanks for the feedback.” Don’t we want our disembodied digital females to stand up for themselves a little? Can humor slyly defuse such comments? And wouldn’t most people prefer to live with a home assistant with some personality? In the not-so-far future, we’ll likely have some robotic or digital aide helping us with an act of daily living, and instead of being that dull roommate flopped on the couch watching TV, it could potentially be a welcome addition to your household.
Taking the road barely travelled
Suffice to say, there are heaps of avenues to explore with humor and technology that haven’t been adequately addressed: which contexts are best suited for humor in technology? What types of humor (slapstick, dry, juvenile, incongruous, the list goes on…) are best-suited for tech? And how about sustaining humor — hearing a joke for the fifth time is typically less funny than hearing it for the first time, so how can a designer maintain enjoyment as the user continues to interact with their technology?
We attempt to chip away at these intimidating questions with some user tests involving Google Maps. Using the principle of “benign violation,” which supposes that what makes something funny is an unexpected deviation from the norm, we take a super familiar interface that is highly-optimized for task completion and layer in some funny stuff. Will people like this? Will they even tolerate it? And what will Google do to us when they find out we’re messing around with one of their flagship products? We’ll see.
Check out the next article in this series in which we write jokes for robots.
