Abstract
Existing personal assistants and agents are by design limited in their ability to form or encourage close personal bonds. The Harmony system is designed to be a customizable personal companion agent capable of close personal interaction via the user’s phone, virtual reality headset, as well as through a physical interactive android body. In this chapter, we will describe the history that led to Harmony’s creation, the unique challenges and the overall system design. We will also look at user reactions to the system and anticipated future developments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alelo Develops an Interactive Robot for Learning Chinese. (2015). Retrieved March 16, 2015, from http://www.prweb.com/releases/chinese/robot/prweb12538156.htm
Amazon Alexa and Echo (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230
Apple’s Siri (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.apple.com/ios/siri/
Becker-Asano, C., & Ishiguro, H. (2011). Evaluating facial displays of emotion for the android robot Geminoid F. In 2011 IEEE Workshop on, Affective Computational Intelligence (WACI) (pp. 1–8).
Canepari, Z., Cooper, D., & Cott, E. Sex dolls that talk back. Robotica, episode 5 (New York Times Video, June 11, 2015). https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/technology/robotica-sex-robot-realdoll.html
Clamp (Writer), Asaka, M. (Director), Gensho, T. (Producer), Ono, T. (Producer), & Sekido, Y. (Producer). (2002). Chobits [TV Series]. Japan: Madhouse
Clarity Labs Lucida. Retrieved from http://lucida.ai/
Glas, D. F., Minato, T., Ishi, C. T., Kawahara, T., & Ishiguro, H. (2014). ERICA: The ERATO intelligent conversational android. In 2016 RO-MAN: The 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp. 22–29).
Google’s Google Now. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.google.com/landing/now/
Hanson, D., Oh, J. H., Kim, W. S., Han, Y., Kim, J. Y., & Park, I. W. (2006). Design of android type humanoid robot Albert HUBO. In 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (pp. 1428–1433).
Hanson, D., Olney, A., Prilliman, S., Mathews, E., Zielke, M., Hammons, D., … Stephanou, H. (2005). Upending the uncanny valley. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (p. 1728)
Harmon, A. (2010, July 5). Trying to forge a friendship with a robot named Bina 48. New York Times, p. A11. Retrieved from https://www.lifenaut.com/new_york_times.pdf
Hauswald, J., Laurenzano, M. A., Zhang, Y., Li, C., Rovinski A., Khurana, A., … Mars J. (2015). Sirius: An open end-to-end voice and vision personal assistant and its implications for future warehouse scale computers. In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), ASPLOS’15 (pp. 223–238). New York, NY: ACM
Home Page of The Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved from http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
Itti, L., Dhavale, N., & Pighin, F. (2003). Realistic avatar eye and head animation using a neurobiological model of visual attention. Proceedings of SPIE International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, 5200, 64–78. Retrieved from http://ilab.usc.edu/publications/doc/Itti_etal03spienn.pdf
Lee, S., Badler, J., & Badler, N. (2002). Eyes alive. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 21(3), 637–644. Retrieved from https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~badler/papers/EyesAlive.pdf
Liu, P., Glas, D. F., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., & Hagita N. (2014). How to train your robot - teaching service robots to reproduce human social behavior. In 2014 RO-MAN: The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp. 961–968).
McMullen, M. (2014). U.S. Patent No. 8888553. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Microsoft’s Cortana (n.d.). Retrieved from https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/02/10/how-cortana-comes-to-life-in-windows-10/
Mori, M., MacDorman, K. F., & Kageki, N. (2012). The uncanny valley [from the field]. Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE, 19, 98–100.
Morph 3D. Retrieved from https://www.morph3d.com/
Nishio, H. I., & Hagita, N. (2007). Geminoid: Teleoperated android of an existing person. In A. C. D. P. Filho (Ed.), Humanoid robotics, new developments (pp. 343–352). London: IntechOpen Limited.
Paro. Retrieved from http://www.parorobots.com/
Robokind. Retrieved from http://robokind.com/
Samsung Bixby. Retrieved from Robokind http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/app/Bixby
Scheutz, M., & Arnold, T. (2016). Are we ready for sex robots? In 2016 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 351–358). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. Retrieved from https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/scheutzarnold16hri.pdf
Silver, D., Hubert, T., Schrittwieser, J., Antonoglou, I., Lai, M.; Guez, A., … Hassabis, D. (2017, December 5). Mastering chess and shogi by self-play with a general reinforcement learning algorithm. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815
Turing, A. M. (1950). I.—Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, LIX(236), 433–460. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433
Wikipedia contributors. (2018a, April 26). Roxxxy. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:15, December 23, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roxxxy&oldid=838325148
Wikipedia contributors. (2018b, December 10). BINA48. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:17, December 23, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BINA48&oldid=872980588
Wikipedia contributors. (2018c, December 19). Her (film). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:17, December 23, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Her_(film)&oldid=874405056
Wikipedia contributors. (2018d, April 26). Eliza Effect. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:26, November 13, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Coursey, K., Pirzchalski, S., McMullen, M., Lindroth, G., Furuushi, Y. (2019). Living with Harmony: A Personal Companion System by Realbotix™. In: Zhou, Y., Fischer, M.H. (eds) AI Love You. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19734-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19734-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19733-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19734-6
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)