Computer, are you listening?

Computer can hold conversations and react to non-verbal signals.

A computer that uses a Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) system to perceive a human’s facial expressions and tone of voice will be able to engage with a user and carry on a conversation. In a project known as SERMANE, the SAL will be able to adapt its own performance and pursue different actions, depending on the non-verbal behaviour of the user. Now, the European Commission has awarded the project a grant of €2.75 million.

The project is led by a German centre for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI, in collaboration with the Queen's University Belfast, Imperial College London, the University of Paris 8, the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the Technical University of Munich.

Professor Roddy Cowie, from the School of Psychology, who leads the team at Queen's, said: "A basic feature of human communication is that it is coloured by emotion. When we talk to another person, the words are carried on an undercurrent of signs that show them what attracts us, what bores us and so on.

Communicating with computers

The fact that computers do not currently do this is one of the main reasons why communicating with them is so unlike interacting with a human. It is also one of the reasons we can find them so frustrating."
"SEMAINE and projects like it will change the way people interact with technology. They mean that you will be talking to your computer in 20 years time.”

The European Commission awarded SEMAINE a grant of €2.75 million after it was ranked first out of 143 bids for medium-sized projects in the area of cognitive systems and robotics.

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