AI-Enabled Laughing Robots are No Joke

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that plays an important role in social situations and transcends cultural boundaries. Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is rapidly being explored as a powerful tool to enable robots to interact with humans for a variety of purposes. A new study published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI unveils a shared laughter generation AI system that enables a robot to share a laugh with a human for greater perceived empathetic conversational interaction. "We propose that our system can be used for situated robot interaction and also emphasize the need for integrating proper empathetic laughs into conversational robots and agents," wrote the lead author Dr. Koji Inoue, Assistant Professor at Kyoto University, along with his research colleagues. The three AI models that comprise the solution were a laugh detector, a shared laughter predictor, and a laugh type selector.