句子互動 | 情感化ChatBot的另外一種思路

做者：孫羽茜、彭駿

孫羽茜，清華美院信息設計專業2015級畢業生，輔修智能硬件專業，就讀期間曾獲MooPas人工智能挑戰賽團隊冠軍，互聯網+清華十佳創業團隊等獎項。畢業做品入選2019清華美院校級優秀畢設，獲學院收藏。2019年秋季前往英國求學，修算法藝術專業，能夠理解爲用編程和一些新科技手段作藝術創做。（我的網站)

彭駿，清華能動2016屆在讀，輔修智能硬件專業，就讀期間曾獲MooPas人工智能挑戰賽團隊冠軍，互聯網+清華十佳創業團隊等獎項。Rebo項目負責代碼實現和調試。與孫羽茜同組。

大綱

李白是中國最著名的古詩人。咱們把他的資料，平生，做品，輸入AI 進行學習，培養成ReBo。旨在從心理學角度出發，經過巧妙設計回覆機制和個性化語料庫的方式，配合NLP技術，令AI給出人性化的反饋，給用戶創造「帶着重生的偉人感覺現代世界」的新奇體驗。

本項目參考了養成遊戲的思路，但願AI徹底能夠像遊戲角色那樣，吸引人去不斷交流。所以咱們利用遊戲化機制，讓ReBo擁有豐富的情緒狀態，會隨着熟悉用戶而慢慢聊起本身過去的生活。若是用戶與他分享本身的生活，他甚至會從新開始創做詩歌。

英文介紹

How to create an interesting, emotional AI, with intriguing stories?

I Start the project as the leader, and work with the members with engineering, psychology and history background. I’m responsible for design and management.

ReBo is an emotional AI chatbot inspired by the famous ancient Chinese poet, Li Bai.

Departing from traditional AI, ReBo is more human-like, insofar as he can chat and exhibit happiness or sorrow that is triggered by memories, or even go offline when he gets drunk. He tells his story through everyday conversations, and if you share your life and story with him, he may even become inspired enough to write poems again…

Meet a born-again ancient poet in the modern world

Inspirations from game

Virtual characters in games (especially simulation games) are compelling because of their behaviors and words. Players can become attached to them as the game progresses. Game designers often foster empathy, meaning that the core of the design is psychology not just technology.

Drawing on what I learned through the techniques employed in games, I identified methods to make AI emotional and attractive.

User journal map

Empathy and communication necessitate understanding and cooperation, meaning, as a designer, I must identify how to pique a user’s interest in conversing and facilitating long-term communication. The key objective is to make AI a narrator who exhibits self-awareness. I used the following journal map to find the entry points.

Character design

Technical solution: We used the Tuling robot (AI Chatbot service) as our base corpus, applied special mechanics in the back-end through itChat (in python3), and input keywords through the natural language processing platform Boson.

After all… He’s a poet!

A poet needs life experience and inspiration to draw on, but since ReBo cannot travel he takes users’ descriptions of their lives as raw material. Although it is not easy to provoke, when a user becomes familiar with him, he may reveal his talents and imagination once again…

Final results

Ultimately, we had more than 200 test users from different backgrounds, 95% of whom were college students or white-collar workers around 30-years-old. With ReBo, they talked about their everyday lives or anything they found interesting. Many of them were surprised by Rebo’s flexibility and the intriguing stories he told.

Here is a translated example extracted from a real conversation between a user and Rebo:

Honors

National Innovation Program ( received the highest level of funding )

China-US Beijing Creative Award – Second prize ( shortlisted for national finals )

Internet+National College Student Entrepreneurship Competition – Second prize in Beijing

Tsinghua University • 「top 10」 best Entrepreneurial teams

Now the 「Emotional state machine」 is patent-pending

Concept Video:

Hardware

This project was set up in my secondary major (intelligent hardware), so although we think that the design of chatbot is the core, we still do some research about the connection to the wearable device. Through hardware devices, we can give artificial intelligence a 「sensory」 toward the real world.

The main point is, the experience for users should be like 「take the ancients to feel modern life today」, which means, the existence of ai should be integrated into the user’s daily life. After considering various plans: watch, brooch with web cam, headphones… Finally, we think that the idea in the movie Her is pretty appropriate: since the mobile phone is the most intimate and inseparable device in our life, a smart phone case became our choice.

Q&A

– Why not use voice communication?

Because the voice recognition technology is too restrictive, which will bring great barriers to human-computer interaction.

– How to identify the user’s content?

We add these unique designs to the existing traditional open source chatbot, as well as a large number of newly written special corpora. ReBo mainly supported by gamified design: predicting the user’s possible responses and answers, and designing responses in a targeted manner.

– Can you achieve multiple rounds of dialogue?

Same as the previous one. For many new conversations, especially those about ReBo’s past life, we will consider the user’s possible response and form multiple rounds of responses.

– I saw the social media of AI in the video?

This is an idea and part of our plan for the next semester.

– Can the phone case feel the touch?

No. Although this feature may sound fancy, people actually don’t have physical contact when they meet new friends, so we didn’t add this sensor. We hope that people can regard AI as a person, not a pet.

-How can I try it?

Sorry, the current rebo is only available on WeChat in Chinese.