A chat with Pixie, Princeton University's socialbot
Smart Home
Alexa, start pixie.
Hi, this is a Alexa prize social bot.
Tell me something interesting.
A sheep, a duck and a rooster were the first passengers in a hot air balloon.
Here in this classroom at Princeton university, a small group of grad students get together to work on a social bot called Pixie.
That runs on Amazon's Alexa voice assistant.
Their work is part of the Alexa Prize, a college competition Amazon started to encourage the development of chattier and more human-like AIs.
So the idea is to try and create a chatbot that can talk to someone, maintain a conversation for about 20 minutes
You have to cater to a wide variety of opinions, a wide variety of interests, and it's fun to see what people want from this and where people take these conversations.
Creating a social bot that can carry on a long conversation, is one of the long standing problems of AI.
It requires teaching a robot all about our world.
THat's why Pixie still gets a lot of things wrong.
Where do you live?
Where do we live interests me too.
[LAUGH]
Where do you live?
[MUSIC]
Earth.
I think people find it easy to imagine these as people at the same time.
There's a kind of distance that comes from knowing that you're not talking to a real person.It allows you to
[MUSIC]
Say things you wouldn't say in real life.
The Princeton team envisions creating social bots that could someday be used for customer service, or be companions for the elderly.
Sing a song.
[MUSIC]
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I am half crazy, all for the love of you.
