Personality
The personality of our robot would be “a curious toddler” who loves asking questions. Some advanced robots like Siri will answer the questions smartly, but few robots would ask the user questions. Therefore, we plan to design a robot that loves to ask questions for learning. We choose the question “what is love” because it is so vague, and different people have a further understanding of it. The user’s answer is not perfect like Wikipedia, but it does show some angles according to people’s experience. I think that presenting other’s responses to people from the other side of the world is very interesting. The robot will work as an agent to communicate between strangers.
The robot might have some childish speaking style, like speaking repetitive words, muttering about some little things to attract the user’s attention, and singing “la la la” when the user tries to interact with it. During the process, I find out that adding some little dramatic conversation would add to the robot’s personality. I make the robot beg the users for expressing their love to it, which might add to the robot’s childish nature. This personality could be add on to some artificial intelligent robots, which need to collect an enormous amount of data from people. I think most parents will have the experience that at one period, their young child loves to ask endless questions as if they want to know everything in the world. I want the user to feel the same to the robot. Instead of feeling answering a question from a heartless machine, the robot will make people feel like the robot is a young child and make people more willing to answer questions.
Prototype
Interaction diagram
Midterm project：https://pastoral-daily-oriole.glitch.me/
After presenting the project, I realize that the robot’s logic does not make sense to many people: the user has to answer the questions first, and then the robot mutters back. Making an on-time conversation with the robot is challenging. If I add some command to the robot, my name, and my answer, and use the speech recognition to detect it to keep having the conversation, all orders should be set. That will leave the users’ input no much freedom. Maybe, there are some ways to make the free conversation work. I will keep exploring it for this semester.