Conventional speech-based interaction systems have only focused on the transmission of logical meaning involved in speech. The application of such systems has been restricted to business services such as making reservations or data retrieval. In the Interactive Poem system, however, a human and a computer agent create a poetic world by exchanging poetic phrases, thus realizing Kansei-based communications between computers and humans. It then describes the details of the system we have developed, including the software and the hardware configurations as well as the interaction mechanism. In human oral communications, sensitivity information, such as emotions and sensitivities, plays a very important role.
Sensitive information is sometimes more important than the logical information included in speech.
This can be confirmed by the fact that babies start to recognize emotional information before they can recognize logical information in their mothers' voice. In the case of adults, we too can recognize what other people want to say at a deeper level by integrating both logical and sensitivity information included in speech. This is the key to smooth communications. Unfortunately, in the field of AI so far, the focus has been on recognition of only meaning information, while Sensitive information has been neglected as noise. Based on the above considerations, we started to study how to realize emotion-based communications between computer agents and humans.