Currently a global multibillion-dollar industry, the increasing demand for robots with human-like social intelligence marks a significant milestone in technological history. Once primarily confined to dull, dirty, and dangerous work, such as stocking shelves, cleaning floors, and deactivating bombs—robots presently are elevated to join the human social world, with immense transformative potential for society. A good example is the provision of health and social assistance services to patients who live alone and are confined to their homes. According to the March 2024 issue of the journal Science Robotics, although their physical appearance is impressive, interactions with robots often are clunky, stilted, and awkward. One critical limitation is that current social robots lack the art of social synchrony, where nods, smiles, gestures, and speech are orchestrated carefully across conversation partners. For social robots to engage in human social interactions, social synchrony skills are essential. A paper in that issue of this periodical addressed the art of social synchrony by endowing one such humanoid social robot, Emo, with it.
The device is a soft-skinned anthropomorphic facial robot that can display a wide range of nuanced facial expressions using 26 magnet-controlled facial actuators. It also has high-resolution cameras in its eye sockets to detect different types of facial expressions. Although Emo can mimic the human facial expressions that it detects, engaging in social synchrony involves a more refined planning and execution of responses. To achieve this outcome, Emo was trained using neural networks to predict the facial expressions of its human interlocutors based on their early facial movements. Emo’s predictive ability enables it to plan and execute its own facial expressions in response, achieving a more human-like social synchrony. Researchers also upgraded Emo’s processing capacity to run on lightweight computing facilities, freeing up processing power for the development of other functions, such as speech and listening. Using this simple and elegant approach, Emo’s social interaction skills have been upgraded from mere mimicry to the art of social synchrony. Such a development has profound implications for the future of social robots.