This year, three Washington-based museums of the Smithsonian Institution deployed a half-dozen four-feet-tall, humanoid robots, nicknamed Pepper, to answer visitors' questions and tell stories, using voice, gestures and an interactive touch screen. They also dance, play games and pose for selfies. Rachel Goslins, director of the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building and overseer of the robots' deployment, said she has been "blown away" by visitors' reactions to them. Pepper, she added, "feels totally aligned with the museums' mission. We are asking people to be present, engaged, to have a communal experience. We're not making you look at your phone even more; we're creating a playful, joyful human experience."

Artificial intelligence has allowed the Art Institute of Chicago to track how long visitors stay in its galleries, leading it to offer more small exhibitions focusing on its permanent collection. And A.I. is aiding the conservation and attribution efforts of Robert Erdmann, senior scientist at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He is developing tools that allow visitors to his museum's website -- which contains over 300,000 digital photographs of objects in its collection -- to use artificial intelligence when they try to make comparisons among these objects, exploring, for example, all works -- beside the museum's famous Vermeer painting of a milkmaid -- of women preparing food. Another possible application of artificial intelligence, according to Elizabeth Merritt, director of the American Alliance of Museums' Center for the Future of Museums, could be the ability of visitors to interact with historical figures at history museums, through chatbots developed using the figures' published writings and archives, as well as oral histories. Robert Stein, executive vice president and chief program officer of the American Alliance of Museums, warned that museums must be aware of privacy issues as they use artificial intelligence, for example, protecting whatever personal information their visitors provide.