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Despite the existence of answer phones and voice mail, a ringing phone remains impossible to ignore. Whether we are having a private conversation, snowed under with work, or just not in the mood to speak to anyone, the phone keeps ringing.
Current mobile communication devices do not grab our attention in a socially appropriate way. They could be disrespectful of ongoing social activity such as an important meeting or private dinner. To improve on this, IT research student Stefan Marti may have the answer: ditch your mobile phone, and get a squirrel. He has built the Cellular Squirrel, a system where the agent that controls your cell phone is embodied in a small portable animatronic device, as a personal 'companion' for the user. This embodiment is able to use the same subtle but still public non-verbal cues to get our attention and interrupt us like humans would do such as eye gaze, posture and small gestures. The user can whisper and listen to their squirrel, receiving and replying to voice instant messages.
Currently, the squirrel prototype needs to communicate with a computer and so is tied to a physical location, but there is no reason why the technology could not eventually fit into something the size of a mobile phone.
Today's cell phones are passive communication portals. They do not 'care' about our ongoing conversations, about the relationship between caller and callee, nor what the purpose of the call is. It deals with incoming communication attempts when the user cannot or does not want to be interrupted. The Cellular Squirrel is part of a larger project that aims at adding elements of human style social intelligence to our mobile communication devices in order to make them more socially acceptable. It is an Autonomous Interactive Intermediary that assumes the role of an actively mediating party between caller, user and co-located people.
In previous incarnations, the device has been a bunny and a parrot. The idea, says Mr Marti, is to dress the technology up as something which we would be happy talking down to. The Intermediary is a conversational as well as robotic agent.
An Intermediary, however, is more than just an interactive animatronic device that listens to you and whispers into your ear. When a call comes in, it detects face-to-face conversations to determine social groupings, may invite vetoes from the co-located people, consults memory of previous interactions stored in the location, and tries to asses the importance of the incoming communication by conversing with the caller.
The current implementation of the Cellular Squirrel is a remote brain robot. It is controlled by a PC with a Bluetooth dongle that runs all the necessary control processes (conversational agent, speech recognition, animatronics control server, etc). But Mr Marti argues that there are still technologies which hardly need to be improved, such as the lift.