Facebook is teaching robots to act like humans

The world's largest social media company Facebook's artificial intelligence (AI) lab has developed a bot that can analyze the facial expressions of the people it interacts with and adapt itself to the human face.

It is powered by a deep neural network that was fed image data from 250 Skype video clips between two humans as part of its training process.

Researchers identified 68 “facial landmarks” to detect subtle reactions and micro-expressions on human faces.

Bots can analyze people's facial expressions

“Although the human faces in our dataset are different, their expressions have similarities that can be extracted from the structure of facial landmarks,” Facebook scientists explained in an article published in New Scientist.

"For example, when people fumble with something, the configuration of their eyebrows and mouth reveals the most about their emotional state."

The scientists then tested the bot's reactions on a group of people.

The bot was asked to “look for facial expressions that are natural, appropriate, and social in response to the user,” and decide whether or not to engage in conversation.

The results showed that the bot passed the test with a decision to choose facial expressions that were "natural and confident" as well as "realistic".

Human subjects interacting with bots are becoming increasingly common in many application areas such as education, healthcare, and personal assistance, researchers say.

The next step in training the bot is to get it to interact with real humans in the real world, the scientists said.

According to Vietnam+