Project Time: Mar, 2018 - Now
Position: Chief Product Manager and Design Team Lead
Responsibility:
Lead the Team to explore the psychological and emotional requirements when driving under different scenarios.
Define and design the emotional touch points between the social robot and the driver or passenger.
Define the Personalized Persona for the social robot, such as different expressions, moods, movement, tones, and ID etc.
Outcome:
Release the in-car social robot - “Xiaodu“ at Baidu Create 2018.
Setup a new research direction of social robot in car for the department of IOV (Internet of Vehicle)
“Xiaodu“ obtains many letter of intent for cooperation form the top OEM including BMW, Hyundai Motor, KIA, Ford, Lincoln, etc.
1. The purpose of establishing an emotional connection
The most positive impact that emotional connection can endow with is the sense of immersion, which will further help people build the trust between each other.
In the other party's emotional exposure, only by substituting oneself into a causal chain with time and change, can one establish a connection between oneself and the other party.
The simple connection between people cannot lead to the establishment of emotion. In order to respond to the change tendency and take corresponding actions, one must feel some change of oneself in the change of the target object.
For example, when we think carefully about the reasons for loving someone, we can always find some fantasy scenes that may make us happy, that is, we will assume that we may encounter various things with this person, and these things will bring happiness to ourselves.
We can find that we love each other because we can deduce the possibility of such a happy experience in the future.
This is the purpose of emotionality, allowing users to further believe that it will bring a continuous and good experience to them, even if these things have not happened.
In the short term, the real function of emotionalization is to let the user be emotionally influenced by feedback to external stimuli, and to amplify pleasure and reduce unhappiness, thus forming a more positive feedback to the vehicle OS or in-car social robot.
2.The Constitution of Emotionalized Output
(1) Forms of emotional expression (expression, action, dressing, pronunciation and intonation, etc.)
(2) Contents of emotional expression (content of proactive recommendation, active feedback of vehicle status, etc.)
(3) Personality, background, world outlook
3.Establishing emotional connection：
（1）Xiaodu expressing its own emotion
(2) Xiaodu arousing the emotion of the users
For the robot's own emotional expression, in form, it can be composed of "expression", "action", "speech tone" and "content" as a whole. In the current situation of technological development, it is unrealistic to let the robot pursue the precise expression of emotions. For example, all of them use customized voice tones, which is a very high cost. [Short-term solution should be customized for the scene], long-term solution is to build an emotional intelligence engine based on artificial intelligence.
In view of how the robot affects the user's emotions, the conventional path is to identify the user's current mood, combine the current scene and user data, and give feedback from the perspective of the user, thereby affecting the user. Through long-term emotional communication, users and robots establish deep emotional relationships.
But this road is currently not going to work. We are currently unable to recognize the user's emotions, and the current intelligence can't be completely "feeling" to think from the user's point of view.
Therefore, it is only possible to combine the scenes, guess the user's emotions, and influence the user's emotions in a large probability and correct manner. For example, when traffic jams, guessing the user's high probability will be impatient, this time providing a soothing way is a high probability of correct operation.
4. Further explain that scene customization is the starting point of emotional robotic productization.
The generation of emotions is constructed by the situation and the intuitive feeling and the deeper feedback.For example, in the middle of the night, the robot tells the user “Don't worry, I will guard you”. The intuitive feeling is that the car cares about me, and the deeper feedback is not necessarily. If you are currently upset, you may feel that it speaks a lot. But if you are current lack of security and lack of love, it may touched you very much. The grasp of this kind of deep feedback can only be achieved by obtaining user information as much as possible and expanding the probability of hitting, but it is impossible to make accurate judgments like logical thinking.
Therefore, the focus of emotional development is to construct a scene, and to amplify the user's pleasant and positive intuitive feeling through interaction in a specific scene, and reduce the negative feelings of anger and anxiety.
5. The user's expectation of the artificial intelligence figure and the character of the emotional robot.
User expectations for artificial intelligence robot are more often obtained from movies:
(1) Strong protector figure - "I Robot"
(2) Warm protector - the Baymax
(3) The wave representing the symbol of wisdom - the Knight Rider
It can be seen that the establishment of the intelligent character is not uniform, and it is highly correlated with the association brought by the role it plays. For example, the solid metal armor of the Gundam makes people feel that it is very strong, so it is the symbol of the protector.
In the driving scene, what character do we want to provide to users?
It should be:
(1) Simple and dependable. Compared with the intelligent character in the movie, in the current driving scene, the proportion of the vehicle as a tool is still the highest. For the tool, the most needed is stable and simple.
(2) Extreme care for the user - considerate and warm.
(3)Young Age. Considering that you don't over-improve the user's expectation of intelligence, it is more appropriate to use a cute character, which can reduce user dissatisfaction and improve user's fault tolerance by selling cute. At the same time, the young character gives users a stronger feeling of “grow together”.
Preset character: staying cute, optimistic, considerate, responsive, executive, strong, always thinking from the owner's point of view, occasionally cranky thinking about the loss, easy to be touched.