Crowd workers help robot keep conversation fresh

People can find a hundred ways to say the same thing, which poses a challenge to robots that are expected to keep up their end of conversations. A Disney Research team's solution is to devise an automated method of crowdsourcing multiple lines of dialogue. After all, "hello" is a perfectly fine greeting, but not every time you see someone. The team developed a persistent interactive personality, or PIP, that can translate high-level goals and variables into simple narratives, effectively summarizing situations it will find itself in. PIP then autonomously presents the descriptions to crowd workers to elicit appropriate speech for the context.