Your Robot Will Feel You Now: Empathy in Robots and Embodied Agents
It addresses the problem of enhancing social and emotional intelligence in AI agents for human-robot interaction and embodied conversational agents, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge.
This chapter reviews how empathy has been implemented in robots and embodied agents by mimicking human and animal behaviors, aiming to apply these lessons to modern language-based agents like ChatGPT.
The fields of human-robot interaction (HRI) and embodied conversational agents (ECAs) have long studied how empathy could be implemented in machines. One of the major drivers has been the goal of giving multimodal social and emotional intelligence to these artificially intelligent agents, which interact with people through facial expressions, body, gesture, and speech. What empathic behaviors and models have these fields implemented by mimicking human and animal behavior? In what ways have they explored creating machine-specific analogies? This chapter aims to review the knowledge from these studies, towards applying the lessons learned to today's ubiquitous, language-based agents such as ChatGPT.