Baby prototype and meeting Erica
Yuki’s Doki Doki Diary
A day in the life of a Baby developer
Phew! What a week, we’ve had a lot of activities this week, both in and outside of the office.
I will spare the details and let the picture speaks, but man, meeting with Erica was quite an experience, to say the least.
First thing first, we have been developing Baby’s prototype, with a help from an engineer, Mr. Adamur, hailing from Okinawa Island. Here is a picture of Mr. Adamur working on the prototype:
Our initial prototype of Baby is here! It replies to human voice and responds to human touch, yet it is still at its infancy at this point. It has only 3 types of responses and 3 colors (representing different emotions) so far, yet it is a huge (baby) step for us to have the first prototype. More on Baby’s first encounter with a human later:)
On a different front, we met Erica — who’s Erica anyway?”
No, she is not just an ordinary gal — she is an Android, nay, Humanoid developed by the team consists of members from Japan Science and Technology Agency, Osaka University, the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, and Kyoto University. The person spearheading this project is Ishiguro Hiroshi, who is renowned robotics specialist in Japan.
Erica employs the latest machine learning technologies, among others, DAE (Denoising Autoencoder) and DNN (Deep Neural Network.) She is capable of extracting verbal as well as non-verbal (including paralinguistic) queues using the microphone array technology — which means, she tilts her head towards you when you talk, and she can recognize what you say and answer your questions. During the demo, we were allowed to ask only a certain types of questions (e.g., what is her birthday, favorite food, etc.) and we were not allowed to ask more than one question at a time. Albeit limited in variety, her response was fairly courteous with colorful vocabulary, sometimes displaying very human-like behaviors; when one of the participants asked her “what are your measurements?” (yes, we WERE alloed to ask this question!) to which she hesitantly replied “I cannt tell you that.” When she was nagged to answer this question more than twice, she unwillingly gave her measurements, which turned out to be more than perfect numbers.
At any rate, she was overall very pleasant humanoid to talk to. Prof. Ishiguro intends to develop her interaction capabilities further and he wishes to her to stand behind the reception desk one day.
Well, at least she is pretty enough to do that, I can vouch for that. (Disturbingly pretty, I must add — I can picture a guy would feel a bit intimidated by her Mona Lisa-esque countenance, and a gal by her perfect eyebrows.)
Looking at what Erica is capable of and how the research has been progressing so far, I have no doubt that the humanoids will one day come close to humans in terms of interactive capacity. I have no doubt that the humanoids and technology that powers them will one day replace some of the mundane jobs today, but the jury is still out on when and how it will happen. For us to leverage humanoids and their interactive capacities, we have to somehow feel at ease with their presence. I was not sure If I get that feeling from her. That will be a challenge worth facing for anyone who is developing an artificial personality and wishes to deliver it to ordinary consumers, not just among the research communities.
All for this week’s report!
Will be back next week with more update:) We Doki Doki team are planning on doing a Hackathon this weekend! Stay tuned, and will be back with more juicy detail about how that goes.
Until then, stay awesome:)
Yuki
