Multimedia Blog Creation System using Dialogue with Intelligent Robot

A multimedia blog creation system is described that uses Japanese dialogue with an intelligent robot. Although multimedia blogs are increasing in popularity, creating blogs is not easy for users who lack highlevel information literacy skills. Even skilled users have to waste time creating and assigning text descriptions to their blogs and searching related multimedia such as images, music, and illustrations. To enable effortless and enjoyable creation of multimedia blogs, we developed the system on a prototype robot called PaPeRo. Video messages are recorded and converted into text descriptions by PaPeRo using continuous speech recognition. PaPeRo then searches for suitable multimedia contents on the internet and databases, and then, based on the search results, chooses appropriate sympathetic comments by using natural language text retrieval. The retrieved contents, PaPeRo's comments, and the video recording on the user's blog is automatically uploaded and edited. The system was evaluated by 10 users for creating travel blogs and proved to be helpful for both inexperienced and experienced users. The system enabled easy multimediarich blog creation and even provided users the pleasure of chatting with PaPeRo.