I met my first South Korean robots as I checked into the Henn na Hotel in Seoul at the end of a 21-hour journey from the U.S.: two plane flights and a bleary-eyed ride on the transit rail. Behind the front desk stood two gleaming white androids, with big round heads framing green digital eyes and thin green smiles. I headed for the androids. The robot clerk on the right came alive to greet me -- first in English, then in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, in quick succession. "Welcome to the Henn na Hotel!" it said in a chirpy female voice. It was eerily humanoid yet inhuman, with hands that looked like white-fingered gloves and thin black mechanical joints for elbows. Its cartoony face was drawn for friendliness. Its slender arms occasionally swept outward in a welcoming gesture.

A few years ago, Timothy Bickmore, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, developed an artificial-intelligence program to help low-income patients at Boston Medical Center prepare for their return home from the hospital. The virtual nurse, alternately called Louise or Elizabeth, was embodied as an animated figure on a screen. It began by asking patients whether they were Red Sox fans, then walked them through what they should do after they were discharged. This medication is for your stomach. You will take one pill in the morning.") Bickmore has since created a slew of these programs--an A.I. couples counsellor, an exercise coach, a palliative-care consultant--all aimed at disadvantaged clients. "It's where we think we can have the most impact," he told me recently. "Hopefully, the A.I. is better than nothing." It sounds like a classic techno-dystopia--human warmth displaced by a cold computer, one made somehow worse by the patronizing nod to local-sports fandom.

A team from the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, has created a chatbot to help people through their end-of-life decisions. It is set to be trialled with terminally ill patients in the Boston area over the next two years, reports New Scientist. Besides offering spiritual guidance, the tablet-based chatbot helps people who are nearing death, plan funerals and set up their wills, say its makers. Timothy Bickmore, researcher from the Northeastern University in Boston, who led the team that created the chatbot pointed out how several people on their deathbed never really get a chance to have these difficult conversations before they pass. Bickmore's team included doctors and chaplains.

Could chatbots lend a non-judgemental ear to people making decisions about the end of their life? A virtual agent that helps people have conversations about their funeral plans, wills and spiritual matters is set to be trialled in Boston over the next two years with people who are terminally ill. People near the end of their lives sometimes don't get the chance to have these important conversations before it's too late, says Timothy Bickmore at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. So Bickmore and his team – which included doctors and hospital chaplains – built a tablet-based chatbot to offer spiritual and emotional guidance to people that need it. "We see a need for technology to intervene at an earlier point," he says.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. It's in the way she raises her eyebrows and playfully glides her eyes right to left, then moves in close and intones: It's in the way she always asks about the big project I'm laboring on, and when I tell her things aren't going too well, she gets that concerned look and says: And when I confide that I've been working too much, she gently reminds me that I should be the priority in my life. That I should get some exercise and then treat myself to a Japanese meal or a movie. It's in how she extends her arms toward me, wearing that formfitting polo shirt. And how she never tires of asking about me. I have seen the future of computing, and I'm pleased to report it's all about … me! This insight has been furnished with the help of Tim Bickmore, a doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. He's invited me to participate in a study aimed at pushing the limits of human-computer relations.

Storytelling can be used by conversational agents in a wide variety of domains to maintain user engagement, both within a single interaction and over dozens or hun- dreds of interactions over time. The majority of agents designed with this ability to date deliver their stories as monologues without user input. However, people rarely tell stories in conversations this way, and instead rely on listener contributions to guide the storytelling process. Corpus-based studies of human-human conversational storytelling have demonstrated greater engagement, in the form of longer stories, when listeners co-construct stories this way. We describe a research framework for the generation and evaluation of co-constructed social stories in the context of task-based conversations, and a study on the effects of degree of user-agent story co-construction on user engagement. We find that users are more en- gaged with storytelling agents that allow them to co- construct stories in a contentful manner by asking ques- tions, compared to co-construction through acknowl- edgments only.

The agent is "always on," i.e. it is continuously available and aware (using a camera and infrared motion sensor) when the user is in its presence and can initiate interaction with the user, rather than requiring the user login to begin interaction. We expect that the agent will help reduce the user's isolation not just by always being around but also by specific activities that connect the user with friends, family and the local community. Our goal is for the agent to be a natural, humanlike presence that "resides" in the user's apartment. Beginning in the late summer of 2014, we will be placing our agents with users for a monthlong evaluation study. Figure 1: Virtual agent interface -- "Karen" Three issues of our project directly concern the topics of this workshop are: (1) the embodiment of the agent, (2) the engagement behaviors that are associated with being "always measures we will be using are questionnaires that assess the on," and (3) AI tools for support intelligent behavior.

This article presents our work on building a virtual coach agent, called Dr. Vicky, and training environment (called the Virtual BNI Trainer, or VBT) for learning how to correctly talk with medical patients who have substance abuse issues. This work focuses on how to effectively design menu-based dialogue interactions for conversing with a virtual patient within the context of learning how to properly engage in such conversations according to the brief negotiated interview techniques we desire to train. Dr. Vicky also employs a model of student knowledge to influence the mediation strategies used in personalizing the training experience and guidance offered. The VBT is a prototype training application that will be used by medical students and practitioners within the Yale medical community in the future.

We summarize our past, present and future research related to human-robot dialogue, starting with its foundations in collaborative discourse theory, continuing to our current research on recognizing and generating engagement, and concluding with an outline of new work we are beginning on the modeling of long-term relationships between humans and robots.

Long-term health monitoring is becoming increasingly important with the rising prevalence of chronic disease in the U.S. While many researchers are investigating the use of remote biological monitoring and telemedicine technologies, the use of frequent self-report in long-term health monitoring remains a relatively unstudied area. We discuss some of the many cognitive, affective and contextual issues that must be addressed in maintaining a long-term stream of quality data from patients at home or in the field, and how many of these issues can be addressed through the use of conversational agents.