Skip to main content

Artificial personality


An artificial personality (AP) is a collection of characteristics, tendencies and behavioral quirks assigned to a chatbot, digital assistant, robot or video game character. A primary goal of adding personality to digital entities is to encourage end users to interact with programming on an emotional, as well as a logical, level.

Personalities are especially significant for voice-activated digital assistants such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana because they are intended to take the place of human assistants. Google has hired a creative team to give its unnamed assistant personality, while Siri was purposely designed early on to be a little sassy. Cortana was modeled after real-life celebrity personal assistants and Alexa now offers a skill that allows her to be disrespectful.

People don't expect their digital assistant to pass the Turing test and be mistaken for a human being, but developers have found that the addition of personality quirks is something end users seem to appreciate. Typically, humor is used to redirect the user's attention from programming deficiencies.

While the ability of an AP to whisper, pause for emphasis or adjust pitch has allowed the program to seem more conversational, designers actually have to be careful not to make the personality seem too human and create an effect known as "uncanny valley." The effect is named for the way the viewer's level of comfort drops as a simulation comes close to, but does not quite reach, realism.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black swan

A  black swan event  is an incident that occurs randomly and unexpectedly and has wide-spread ramifications. The event is usually followed with reflection and a flawed rationalization that it was inevitable. The phrase illustrates the frailty of inductive reasoning and the danger of making sweeping generalizations from limited observations. The term came from the idea that if a man saw a thousand swans and they were all white, he might logically conclude that all swans are white. The flaw in his logic is that even when the premises are true, the conclusion can still be false. In other words, just because the man has never seen a black swan, it does not mean they do not exist. As Dutch explorers discovered in 1697, black swans are simply outliers -- rare birds, unknown to Europeans until Willem de Vlamingh and his crew visited Australia. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the phrase black swan as a metaphor for how humans deal with unpredictable events in his 2007...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...
Post a Comment
Read more

6G (sixth-generation wireless)

6G (sixth-generation wireless) is the successor to 5G cellular technology. 6G networks will be able to use higher frequencies than 5G networks and provide substantially higher capacity and much lower latency. One of the goals of the 6G Internet will be to support one micro-second latency communications, representing 1,000 times faster -- or 1/1000th the latency -- than one millisecond throughput. The 6G technology market is expected to facilitate large improvements in the areas of imaging, presence technology and location awareness. Working in conjunction with AI, the computational infrastructure of 6G will be able to autonomously determine the best location for computing to occur; this includes decisions about data storage, processing and sharing.  Advantages of 6G over 5G 6G is expected to support 1 terabyte per second (Tbps) speeds. This level of capacity and latency will be unprecedented and wi...
Post a Comment
Read more