A chat engine is disclosed herein that can conduct emotionally intelligent chat conversations with client device users. User chat responses and surrounding environmental data are analyzed to respectively detect the user's emotional state and surrounding environments. A series of response selector components identify or generate possible chat responses to a user's chat statements based on the detected emotional states environment of the user. Emotionally intelligent chat responses are selected for presentation to a user based on calculated likelihoods that the responses will likely change or maintain the user's emotional state. Using the techniques disclosed herein, the chat engine tailors conversational responses to a user depending the user's detected emotional state.

Emotionally intelligent chat engine

In the future our daily life interactions with other people, with computers, robots and smart environments will be recorded and interpreted by computers or embedded intelligence in environments, furniture, robots, displays, and wearables. These sensors record our activities, our behavior, and our interactions. Fusion of such information and reasoning about such information makes it possible, using computational models of human behavior and activities, to provide context- and person-aware interpretations of human behavior and activities, including determination of attitudes, moods, and emotions. Sensors include cameras, microphones, eye trackers, position and proximity sensors, tactile or smell sensors, et cetera. Sensors can be embedded in an environment, but they can also move around, for example, if they are part of a mobile social robot or if they are part of devices we carry around or are embedded in our clothes or body. 

Our daily life behavior and daily life interactions are recorded and interpreted. How can we use such environments and how can such environments use us? Do we always want to cooperate with these environments; do these environments always want to cooperate with us? In this paper we argue that there are many reasons that users or rather human partners of these environments do want to keep information about their intentions and their emotions hidden from these smart environments. On the other hand, their artificial interaction partner may have similar reasons to not give away all information they have or to treat their human partner as an opponent rather than someone that has to be supported by smart technology.

This will be elaborated in this paper. We will survey examples of human-computer interactions where there is not necessarily a goal to be explicit about intentions and feelings. In subsequent sections we will look at (1) the computer as a conversational partner, (2) the computer as a butler or diary companion, (3) the computer as a teacher or a trainer, acting in a virtual training environment (a serious game), (4) sports applications (that are not necessarily different from serious game or education environments), and games and entertainment applications.

No Grice: Computers that Lie, Deceive and Conceal

Chatbots and embodied conversational agents show turn based conversation behaviour. In current research we almost always assume that each utterance of a human conversational partner should be followed by an intelligent and/or empathetic reaction of chatbot or embodied agent. They are assumed to be alert, trying to please the user. There are other applications which have not yet received much attention and which require a more patient or relaxed attitude, waiting for the right moment to provide feedback to the human partner. Being able and willing to listen is one of the conditions for being successful. In this paper we have some observations on listening behaviour research and introduce one of our applications, the virtual diary companion.

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Peter-Paul van Maanen

Papers

A virtual diary companion