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Bilingual 'Roboceptionist' Identifies Cultural Cues for Personalized Conversations

Rebecca Kutzer-Rice | Date: 10-25-10 | Comments

Hala, a robotic receptionist, understands multiple languages, identifies cultural cues and even has a personal history. The innovative machine could pave the way for various other human-computer interaction systems.

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Bilingual 'Roboceptionist' Identifies Cultural Cues for Personalized Conversations

The computerized receptionist speaks both Arabic and English, and can determine a user's cultural background (source: University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences).

Several months ago, we wrote about a virtual receptionist that can answer and route calls, and even set appointments. This concept is being taken to the next level with the "roboceptionist," a computerized receptionist that is bilingual and sensitive to cultural nuance.

Developed by researchers at the University of Arizona (UA) and Carnegie Mellon University, the robot�named "Hala"�speaks both Arabic and English, and can tailor conversation to a person's cultural background.

At Carnegie Mellon's campus in Qatar, an existing version of the roboceptionist already greets visitors in the two languages. But because the machine is not sensitive to cultural cues, miscommunications often occur. For example, a user might request a meeting "week after week," which in English means "every week," but in some Arabic dialects means, "every other week." Sandiway Fong, a UA associate professor of linguistics and computer science, is now joining the team to fix cultural glitches like these.

"They invited me to join the team because they saw opportunities to generalize and improve the limited language capabilities of Hala," Fong said in a statement. "They needed Hala to be more flexible in dealing with language input from users. And that is where the University of Arizona comes in. We will provide both the language-specific and inter-language-related cultural capabilities so that this robot can be not just bilingual, but bicultural.

"You may speak Arabic, but you may choose to converse with the robot in English," said Fong. "You may be conversing with the sensibility and the cultural background and the idioms from the Arabic world. This robot needs to understand both."

Next: Making the Robot More Personable >>