Abstract
The objective of this chapter is to discuss the authors' interaction and involvement with technology and bots, opening a whole new and wide scope of possibilities while letting bots comfort us. The prevalence of bots and automation is increasing by every passing day – Cortana, Siri have been here for a long time and have now been overtaken by Alexa and other home automation systems that provide a two-way dialogue conversations. This chapter explores the possibilities of creating bots that can cheer us up when we are sad. Analyzing the semantics of our sentences and analyzing the pitch of our voice to identify our emotional state, and then providing an n-way dialogue conversation, relevant to the then existing context, instead of the mundane two-way dialogue conversation is the lucid content of this chapter. Summing it up, this chapter examines the possibility of creating bots that can serve as an emotional support to us humans.
TopMotivation And Inspiration
This project initially started as a vague embryo of idea – to create something that would break the stereotype of being ‘addicted’ to the technology and its catering devices. In today's age, we are so driven by technology extensively - which is a good thing. We are embracing the new changes and developments to facilitate our lives. But at the same time, we apparently end up blaming technology for out casting us and barring ourselves from social interactions. We end up saying we don't have anyone to talk to just because of being so into technology. Then why not use the technology itself to solve this problem? This social stigma of barring oneself from social interactions allegedly because of technology is the exact problem that our project has addressed, and solved using the technology itself.
This was just an ignitor towards a wider perspective that would then serve as the main purpose of pursuing CHEERBOT. The impetus of it is right as in its namesake – to cheer everyone up, but delving a little deep, when does anyone need cheering up? There are so many reasons why someone would be sad, especially in today’s age – loneliness, depression, anxiety etc. But the worst outcome of these sentiments is outrageously alarming.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Emotional Confrontation: An assurance, and a form of emotional support provided in order to give hope, when a person is sad and/or in a depressed state.
Facial Gesture and Contour Analysis: The process of analyzing facial expressions in the form of gestures by mapping and calibrating every expression against the facial contours to eventually obtain a facial gesture.
NLP: Natural language processing is the facilitative process enabling a computer to understand natural languages such as English.
LSTM: Long short-term memory is the building block of a specific kind of recurrent neural network.
CHEERBOT: A chatbot that operating in the scope of user’s emotional wellbeing by performing sentiment analysis and determining user’s emotional state.
Voice Pitch: In a stream of audio input of the user, voice pitch defines the most distinct frequency of from the chunk of the voice clip, for all the chunks of the voice clip.