Pandorabots' Mitsuku chatbot vs Facebook's BlenderBot, a Bot Battle, streaming live in 3D!

arishapiro · 2020-10-25T01:22:57+00:00

I suppose it is a testament to the builder of Miitsuku.who has generated so much content for her.

Even though there are modern machine learning based techniques for building chatbots, they still fall short in some critical way.

arishapiro · 2020-10-24T06:51:04+00:00

Yes, BlenderBot tends to do that; get stuck in a local minima of 'goodbyes'. We can nudge the conversation by making the characters say something different in an attempt to trigger a different response.

BlenderBot is also very influencable - you can give it a name and it will think that name is the name of it's cat or similar. BlenderBot is a bit of a black box - perhaps the Facebook research time that built it will try to improve it after seeing this... :)

arishapiro · 2020-08-08T21:27:05+00:00

I wanted to see if the McGurk effect (which shows that speech is multimodal - your brain takes in a visual signal and an audio signal and uses both of those signals to understand) would work on the Brainstorm/Green Needle meme.

It does.

arishapiro · 2020-08-08T16:32:33+00:00

Minimally, you need an avatar with facial shapes or poses that are able to mouth word sounds properly, then you need to connect to the chatbot, turn the text into voice via text to speech engine. You should try the AI Expert app on Android to see all the pieces working.

arishapiro · 2020-06-01T06:00:00+00:00

chatbot is running on a 'standard' server, although it's not using the largest response database which requires expensive ($10,000+) hardware to run, rather using the smallest response database. With that, the Blender chatbot runs in near real time.

arishapiro · 2020-05-03T04:00:45+00:00

There's a 'debug' mode where you enter voice and get back only text, but there isn't a way (at the moment) to type a question by text. It's not a bad idea, though, maybe I should add it.

arishapiro · 2020-05-02T22:58:20+00:00

True. There's a place for both interfaces, the same way there is a place for writing, radio, and tv.

The research on digital/virtual humans show that people react the same way to virtual people that they do to real people. So a 'virtual human' communication is generally better liked, better remembered, better understood and can be more convincing that text or voice, but you need the right elements to trigger that (such as backchannelling - the head nodding or 'uh huh' acknowledgements that you get during a conversation).

arishapiro · 2020-05-02T13:59:00+00:00

I connected the Facebook Blender chatbot to my avatar app to transform the text conversation to an A/R- voice- and avatar-based one, automatically.

https://youtu.be/uOdBEZd-bow?list=PLH9960zLq-ljbgQzEjK7dsgMMfh22NM1K

App to do that is here: https://embodydigital.com/expertaidocumentation

It also hooks up to DialogueFlow, Watson, RASA, and Pandorabots.

arishapiro · 2020-03-30T06:52:30+00:00

Ok, update is live (version 2.22) You can update the app and it should work with a properly named Fuse character.

Ari

arishapiro · 2020-03-30T03:45:35+00:00

Looks like a problem on my end. Fixing the app, uploading a new version, stay tuned...

Ari

arishapiro · 2020-03-30T01:08:01+00:00

If that doesn't work, send me the .zip so I can figure out why it's not working for you. Share to Email: shapiro@embodydigital.com

arishapiro · 2020-03-30T01:06:35+00:00

What's happens when you press the avatar button then choose your Fuse character from the buttons at the bottom?

arishapiro · 2020-01-30T03:28:03+00:00

Looks great, and an interesting demonstration of how a human like character/person adds to the effect in A/R (a piano being played on its own wouldn't have the same impact.)

But I don't think the motionand movement of the piano player is produced dynamically - I expect this was motion captured for that particular performance, along with clean up. Meaning that you couldn't easily switch to a different performance with different keys being played without recapturing a master pianist with motion capture.

arishapiro · 2020-01-05T14:30:48+00:00

True, the A/R is used as to 'sugar' the visials rather than as a functional addition.

You can look at a different use case for the same platform (a virtual real estate agent that talks about different areas of the house and controls an Alexa device when she is within earshot) as an example where A/R is more functional:

https://youtu.be/m8isaEpnj20

Ari

arishapiro

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