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Curiosity Weekly

A Robot That Talks to Itself Might Be Easier to Interact With

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6963 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2021

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Learn about interacting with robots that talk to themselves; “mad honey,” a rare, dangerous hallucinogen; and “alief.”

Robots that talk to themselves might be easier to interact with by Grant Currin

"Mad honey" is a weird, rare, dangerous hallucinogen used as medicine around the Black Sea by Steffie Drucker

Alief Is When You Act In Opposition To Your True Beliefs by Ashley Hamer

Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free!

 

Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/a-robot-that-talks-to-itself-might-be-easier-to-interact-with


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

0:04.8

Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about why

0:09.0

robots that talk to themselves might be easier to interact with. A weird, rare, dangerous hallucinogen known as mad honey, and why you sometimes

0:18.0

react to things in a way that's in opposition to your true beliefs.

0:21.6

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

0:24.0

Virtual assistance like Siri and Alexa can be helpful.

0:28.0

But they can also be really, really frustrating when they do things that don't make any sense.

0:34.0

Researchers in Italy have come up with a solution.

0:37.0

It's not a smarter robot.

0:39.0

It's a robot that thinks out loud.

0:41.0

It, by the way, is named Pepper. You might have seen Pepper before, maybe as a

0:46.9

greeter or a robot assistant at a fancy storefront. It's this friendly-looking

0:51.6

humanoid robot with big eyes and a tiny mouth like an

0:54.7

anime character and a slender all-white body. It also has an open source

1:00.0

platform which makes it handy for research like this.

1:03.0

What's different about this version of Pepper's programming is that the robot speaks a sort of inner monologue

1:09.6

while it's trying to figure out what to do. In one experiment, researchers had Pepper work with a human to set a table.

1:16.8

Pepper was taught where everything was supposed to go and it knew that the napkin was supposed to go on the plate.

1:23.0

But in the experiment, its human companion

1:25.6

told the robot to put the napkin on the table instead.

1:29.5

That's a big conundrum for a robot.

1:31.8

Pepper responded by talking through the program out loud.

...

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